Zen Buddhism

[Gemini]

My personal view of meditation is that it differs from simple mindfulness.  Mindfulness in ordinary activities does little to restructure the way our brains process information.  In ordinary consciousness, the different centers of thought in our brain compete for overall attention, firing off largely unrestricted.  My view is that in intense meditation, the brain is learning to focus activity in a few select portions of the brain.  It is a form of training our mind how to do that.  Once the skill is acquired through intense meditation, it can be harnessed in less rigorous circumstances.  Mindfulness to me is like meditation lite -- it can alter the way the brain processes things for that short time period, but does little to retrain the mind overall. (in my opinion)  So in my view there is a reason for the rigors of practice which are not met by simply trying to live mindfully.

The way I think of it is that what we call "consciousness" is a specific kind of complex experience: consciousness of consciousness. The neural correlate would presumably be the pre-frontal lobes, monitoring various other areas of the brain. 

My experience of meditation is that when I get out of the well-worn connections that I spend most of my time in, I can see that there's a great deal going on in my mind that goes unnoticed by this meta-consciousness or self-consciousness. I'm experiencing it, but the nature of the experience is too simple to form thoughts like, "I'm experiencing such and such." It's like you said--different centers of thought in the brain competing for overall attention, without any kind of logical or rational oversight. It's a messy, winner-take-all process. 

I'm guessing meditation is a way of forming new connections between the pre-frontal lobes and other areas of the brain, allowing you to be more selective in your decision making processes.

And then there's a whole other aspect to meditation, where you get really fine-grained and analyze things like how the mind constructs our experience of space. Once you see how some of our most basic and seemingly nonanalyzable concepts and intuitions are metal constructs that break down into smaller components, I don't think you can help but be skeptical of metaphysics that rests on a priori reason.