The description sounded like both parties were assuming chakras involved some actual mystical energy and were doing the invisible garage dragon dance. The parapsychology angle to this one is simple that even without knowing about a specific rebuttal, chakras are a well-known mystical concept, parapsychology research has been poking at most of the obvious mystical claims, and if parapsychology had verified that some supernatural phenomenon is actually real, we’d have heard of it.
If they were talking about the non-mystical model, the first person could’ve just said that it’s a possibly helpful visualization shorthand for doing relaxation and biofeedback exercises and there’s no actual supernatural energies involved.
Yeah I don’t know what exactly was said, but given that this was the CFAR alumni reunion, I would be willing to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and assume a non-crazy presentation until I hear more details. Especially since a lot of things which have sounded crazy and mystical have turned out to have reasonable explanations.
My sense of what the person-at-the-reunion was talking about (having chatted with them a bit, although not sure I understand their position well enough to speak for them) was a model where Chakras roughly correspond to “application of Gendlin’s Focusing, directed to particular areas of the body, turns out to yield different information.”
i.e. a thing that I’ve heard reported by several LessWrongers is that focusing directed at your stomach tends to give a set of information about what your subconscious is thinking/feeling/interested-in, than focusing other areas of your body, or without any directed attention at all.
I’ve heard a couple people make the broader, somewhat stronger claim that each of the body-areas associated with a chakra tend to have consistent effects across people when used as introspection targets.
This doesn’t seem particularly mysterious to me, although it seems reasonable to be escalatingly skeptical of:
“introspecting with a focus on particular body parts yields different information about what’s going on with you subconsciously than generic introspection”
“one particular body part tends to be particular useful for this”
“seven body parts tend to be particularly useful for this in a way that corresponds to traditional chakras, and there’s a model of how those areas relate with particular introspective techniques that tend to cause particular effects, across people”
The description sounded like both parties were assuming chakras involved some actual mystical energy and were doing the invisible garage dragon dance. The parapsychology angle to this one is simple that even without knowing about a specific rebuttal, chakras are a well-known mystical concept, parapsychology research has been poking at most of the obvious mystical claims, and if parapsychology had verified that some supernatural phenomenon is actually real, we’d have heard of it.
If they were talking about the non-mystical model, the first person could’ve just said that it’s a possibly helpful visualization shorthand for doing relaxation and biofeedback exercises and there’s no actual supernatural energies involved.
Yeah I don’t know what exactly was said, but given that this was the CFAR alumni reunion, I would be willing to give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and assume a non-crazy presentation until I hear more details. Especially since a lot of things which have sounded crazy and mystical have turned out to have reasonable explanations.
My sense of what the person-at-the-reunion was talking about (having chatted with them a bit, although not sure I understand their position well enough to speak for them) was a model where Chakras roughly correspond to “application of Gendlin’s Focusing, directed to particular areas of the body, turns out to yield different information.”
i.e. a thing that I’ve heard reported by several LessWrongers is that focusing directed at your stomach tends to give a set of information about what your subconscious is thinking/feeling/interested-in, than focusing other areas of your body, or without any directed attention at all.
I’ve heard a couple people make the broader, somewhat stronger claim that each of the body-areas associated with a chakra tend to have consistent effects across people when used as introspection targets.
This doesn’t seem particularly mysterious to me, although it seems reasonable to be escalatingly skeptical of:
“introspecting with a focus on particular body parts yields different information about what’s going on with you subconsciously than generic introspection”
“one particular body part tends to be particular useful for this”
“seven body parts tend to be particularly useful for this in a way that corresponds to traditional chakras, and there’s a model of how those areas relate with particular introspective techniques that tend to cause particular effects, across people”