Sufficient to say I haven't managed to succeed in any of my attempts to perform the various psychic feats that would confirm it as real a phenomenon. I've had limited success in my practices on a personal scale, but the potential for muddying these results with delusions is too high to extrapolate anything of use from them. I can easily see how many of the practices could have massive mental benefits as they almost all concern themselves with attaining a peaceful mind first, and pursuing the manipulation of energy second. However I wasn't setting out to prove that meditation could have calming effects or that training could improve focus - we already know these things, there's no real mystery involved.
Though I think it's worthwhile to note the significance of the changes involving your state of mind that working on these practices will have. You're not going to turn into a monk in a day or anything, but for a man like myself thats never really bothered with matters of the 'spirit', the calm and relaxation you can get are difficult to describe, and quite potent. Once I was aware of a few of the easier beginner steps to handling 'energy' I could achieve a level of detached peace that I wouldn't otherwise get without taking a hour out of my day to read, or indulge in some other hobby. Furthermore, working at the starter steps of meditation managed to get me into relaxed states I wouldn't know how to replicate in any other manner. The closest experience I have comes from the odd occasion I've woken up at night, not sure of what roused me. The time when everything's dark and quiet and none of the worries or troubles of the day intrude. The only times during the day I've come across a similar sensation involved long walks through the forest, over an hour in length. To achieve the same results in ten minutes in my living room was... surprising, to say the least.
Further exploration of psychic manipulation may prove difficult. The next step is undoubtably finding a way to verify that my current developments are energy based rather than a personal delusion or random firing of nerves, but to do so I will need some one in a similar stage. I don't want to go into any of the online communities due to the risk of running across trolls or individuals who may very well be knee-deep in personal fantasies. However my options aren't precisely varied, and to give up now would be to reach an unsatisfactory conclusion, even for myself. I never intended to prove anything on a world scale, but if I don't even make the attempt to verify the existence of psychic exchange I'll just want to readdress the notion in the future.
A final concern I've come across is the connection to religion that a number of communities I've come across have. I hate to phrase it this way, but I feel that incorporating any sort of religion into these practices only heightens the chance for hallucination to be taken as legitimate energy movement. Belief in the unprovable seems like a very poor basis to examine magic or frankly anything. It opens the door to abandoning the scientific method before the experiments even begin, and provides a catalog of excuses to ignore when your attempts are honestly failing. However these are just issues with how I would interact with these communities, the real concern is the sheer number of them. Due to the method problems it means that even if one community happen to have stumbled across an actual way to interact with magic (for want of a better term) it would be impossible to distinguish it from the numerous others who failed.
This study is becoming much more difficult than I original anticipated. None the less, I must press on if only to exhaust my own desire for the truth of the matter.
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