How do I do meditation?

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The autotags on this question are great.

What defines meditation is the attempt to stop conscious thought. If you’re not trying to stop conscious thought, you’re not meditating. If you’re directing conscious thought inward to drive self-knowledge, that’s introspection and not meditation. You can accomplish the same goal that introspection has through meditation, by simply directing your subconscious to produce insights and then quieting the mind.

Aside from that, meditation can have a lot of different directions and goals and approaches. You can visualize something or do ‘inverse visualization’ which is where techniques like OBE and astral projection reside. The difference is that visualization is a conscious process while inverse visualization calls experience from the subconscious. Inverse visualization is generally considered to be a more advanced technique than the normal sort.

The Buddhists distinguish between insight and concentration practice. This distinction runs along purpose lines rather than functional ones.

Concentration practice is exceedingly difficult and requires daily practice for hours. With normal meditation, your conscious thought stream is ‘forcefully’ suppressed as it just gets in the way of your goals. But at some point thoughts that aren’t mundane resurface, thoughts are how we generate meaning and make sense of things. You’re going to want to make sense of the experiences you have meditating. Concentration practice allows none of that silliness. You’re supposed to literally stop thinking and proceed through a number of mental states called jhanas. The first obstacle that most people run into is getting really bored. You solve that by ensuring that you’re always moving towards more pleasure. Not only your thoughts but your emotional state must be managed.

Insight practices are more familiar and are probably easier, though I’m a sample size of one. Concentration forces you deeper and deeper into trance, while insight starts out with a light trance and then almost immediately you restart thought and start trying to make sense of your trance feelings, allowing yourself to ‘move’ around freely. What makes insight difficult is the tendency to return thought to mundane modes.

Learning how to stop thought is the first goal. Access concentration is the ability to, on demand, stop thinking for 10 or more minutes.

As you get more fluent in meditation, you’ll soon come to sense an undercurrent of brain activity, that’s not quite conscious, but no longer fully unconscious. This is ‘the watcher’ and it goes on behind the scenes making meaning behind the experiences you are having. If you think about what it is that’s actually watching the watcher, that’s the start of nonduality, or enlightenment, though just having the insight won’t make you much more enlightened all by itself. You can’t really stop this current of brain activity, what you can stop is the comparatively ‘heavy’ inner monologue of hopes, wishes, fears, disgusts.

What distinguishes the watcher from conscious thought once you get down to that level is that the monologue can be put into words, while the content of the watcher can’t be articulated. If you meditate further you’ll find that the inner monologue is actually coming from the watcher and you’ll be able to disrupt that process. This happens any time you stop thought, but meditation allows you to experience ‘how’ it happens. The peace this brings is astounding.