Meditation
What the fuck is meditation? Do you think you know, punk? Huh, punk? Yeah, that's right. You have no fucking clue, and mostly neither do I.
[ see also re the illusion of transparency
some of the confusion is just like, maybe the kinds of problems we might get with the word "exercise"? but not quite within a tradition they'll refer to whatever it is they do (or just some of that stuff) as "meditation", which is fine, but this make it sound like that's what meditation is. I think people wouldn't really make this mistake with 'exercise' tbh
the word itself in reference to things we would identify as spiritual practices is relatively modern, iirc in latin historically meditatiō meant something more like "contemplate, reflect" which is especially funny bc some modern ppl like to distinguish "contemplative" practices with "meditative" practices -- maybe a fine enough distinction but still lol
anyway, not sure exactly what happened, I think there was some involvement within catholicism I want to say in the 16th century? still didn't mean like, dhyāna, samādhi, etc etc. not sure the history with the modern usage of the word vis a vis eastern monastic traditions
[obviously, and this is so obvious I shouldn't have to say it, we're often working with practices and concepts from other cultures, which importantly literally use completely different words! if I said dhyāna, that actually still doesn't narrow things down overwhelmingly, but we would be way less confused!] in any case, obviously, they might cut the world up differently, and especially for very culturally specific practices etc etc.
the other part of the puzzle here is that the actual experiences, and the actual doing to fthe thing, let alone whatever the intended target is, are not the same as the descriptions that are given. so in particular people often conflate like, whatever the practice instructions are (especially the like, extremely preliminary instructions) with "what meditation is" -- as though they like, were actually achieving what the instructions ostensibly described, or as though they even really understood the instructions anyway. [to be clear also, who defines what "the thing" is? you can obviously go off on your own and do whatever you want, but maybe what you arrive at is not that helpfully called meditation. in any case narrowly you might not be doing "meditation" as far as the tradition you started in is concerned]
in practice, in buddhist monastic traditions, you'd (almost always) be working with a teacher, and the instructions would change constantly depending on whatever was actually happening in your practice, very regularly completely throwing out or contradicting previous instructions. I know less about other traditions but this broad shape is common, where at minimum there isn't one thing called "meditation" (or whatever word they're using in chinese or thai or sanskrit or arabic or whatever), there's a bunch of stuff, and it may or may not have names, and things change in response to external and internal circumstances
again part of the trouble here is that traditionally, you'll have thousands of false starts, dead ends, etc etc, before you find your feet, and even then you'll probably your sense of what the thing really is several times over. so, whatever you were taught as a novice, let alone what you understood was mostly sort of irrelevant to the actual thing, which you had to fight for for months or years.
(also, if you go look at eg. the pali canon, it's like, they don't even describe the practices in that much detail! a lot of stuff they give descriptions that are so sparse you wouldn't really be able to implement them, and modern "traditional" teachers in theravada are mostly in lineages which had to reconstruct the practices based on intuition and experimentation, because the canon actually says so little)
also, now, fine, there's a bunch of other stuff in say christianity, do we want to call that meditation? (this is ignoring what's sometimes called "christian meditation" which afaict is used by ppl who want to have their coastal progressive spirituality cake and eat it too lol re this question mostly I don't even care, I think there's a bunch of practices (really, big nebulous cultural clusters of practice and tradition), I almost never use the word meditation, and i don't rly care what's meditation or not. (very very occasionally this is used to refer to hesychasm which is absolutely just christian meditation and is totally traditional, and is awesome, but that's a separate discussion)
OK! so that preface out of the way, what the fuck even is the word used to refer to? Again I'd try to distinguish in this list like, a. what the instructions are, b. what people are actually doing with their bodymind [maybe can't use that word], c. what the ostensible goal is, and d. what the reports are of "success" (often not the same as the goal).
with every single item in this list, you should assume "this word is problematic, and is used to mean a bunch of different things by different people, and if i think I know what it is singularly I'm almost certainly confused
mindfulness
Everything I said about meditation being ambiguous, varied, and probably-not-what-you-think-you-know applies to mindfulness as well. mindfulness even in orthodox traditions is hard-won and often contrary to people's intuitions going on, with major nonmonotonicities
[ again we'd at minimum want to distinguish a. "mindfulness" a la jon cabat-zinn, b. "mindfulness" a la vague coastal liberal culture, and c. specific practices (or often more like aspects of practice) from traditional systems which are translated as "mindfulness"
more specifically ]
concentration
altered states otherwise (usually but not always through concentration)
purposeful modification of perception
maybe included here is modification of perception by way of dissolving [ugh, not the word] practices, "vipassana"
energy practices
some (ugh) "meditative" kinds of physical practices
tai chi etc, but maybe broader
]
is meditation about sitting in this cool posture on the floor?
not rly? like nonzero but it's extremely marginal just descriptively blah blah traditionally they have often used other postures, tho the whole upright sitting on the floor thing is pretty common traditionally. is that what meditation is? who knows, who cares, lol