I’d claim there are fundamentally two types of meditation. One that practices lookingat the sensations and one the practices visualizing (or manipulating) certain sensations. Many practices do a bit of both. Vipassana and Zen lean heavily on the “looking” side. Concentration and energy practices (like tantra) lean heavily on the “visualizing” side.
This is different than how I think of meditation practices being divided, so I’d like to provide an alternative categorization.
I think of meditation in terms of task-positive and task-negative forms. That is, some meditation types are task-positive (engage the task-positive network in the brain) because they require you to focus on a task. Other types are task-negative (engage the task-negative or default mode network in the brain) because they ask you to give up focus. This leads to different sorts of groupings than the ones you give.
For example, Vipassana meditation forms seem to be firmly on the task-positive side based on my understanding of them, both concentration to insight meditation, because insight meditation (again as I understand it, not from practicing it) builds on mental pliancy (extreme ability to effortlessly concentrate) to look at the self. Zazen, on the other hand, is a kind of task-negative meditation where you don’t focus on anything, you just let the default mode network run and through practice learn to allow it to run without feeding back its output into itself, allowing you to experience the default mode network without also creating the self from it.
Now the task positive/negative categorization is not how meditation practices are generally thought of since most practices seem to be of the task-positive type and so find other distinctions more important to make. That being said as a zen practitioner I find the distinction helpful to understand how zazen is different and why most descriptions of meditation practices seem foreign to me: they’re using the brain in a very different way from what happens when you sit zen.
Good points. I agree that there are many ways to slice these practices. This goes along with habryka’s point that I should have split this post into two parts, which I agree with as well.
This is different than how I think of meditation practices being divided, so I’d like to provide an alternative categorization.
I think of meditation in terms of task-positive and task-negative forms. That is, some meditation types are task-positive (engage the task-positive network in the brain) because they require you to focus on a task. Other types are task-negative (engage the task-negative or default mode network in the brain) because they ask you to give up focus. This leads to different sorts of groupings than the ones you give.
For example, Vipassana meditation forms seem to be firmly on the task-positive side based on my understanding of them, both concentration to insight meditation, because insight meditation (again as I understand it, not from practicing it) builds on mental pliancy (extreme ability to effortlessly concentrate) to look at the self. Zazen, on the other hand, is a kind of task-negative meditation where you don’t focus on anything, you just let the default mode network run and through practice learn to allow it to run without feeding back its output into itself, allowing you to experience the default mode network without also creating the self from it.
Now the task positive/negative categorization is not how meditation practices are generally thought of since most practices seem to be of the task-positive type and so find other distinctions more important to make. That being said as a zen practitioner I find the distinction helpful to understand how zazen is different and why most descriptions of meditation practices seem foreign to me: they’re using the brain in a very different way from what happens when you sit zen.
Good points. I agree that there are many ways to slice these practices. This goes along with habryka’s point that I should have split this post into two parts, which I agree with as well.