Why do people do all these strange things?
To make more money with "better brain" ?
To make more money with "better brain" ?
Yes, see: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...
You would notice more awareness, more focus, clarity and possibly well being. Rest of the world would seem less confusing.
Questioning the assumption that your normal wakeful mental state is the ultimate 'being alive and conscious' what your brain can do might be the first step. If you persist, eventually you see meditation same way as brushing your teeth. It's important part of maintaining your mental hygiene.
Meditation helps me deal with ADD and depression and increases my executive functioning immensely. I think it should be taught in schools to children-- the mere discipline meditation grants you is worth passing on.
Happiness/sadness is but another duality. There is no peace in duality. Once you understand (as you seem to) that one can find no lasting peace in ephemeral things (money, status, physical pleasures) it's a natural progression to throw all the dualities away and seek the source, Brahman, the ultimate reality, formless, changeless. Of course given the extent of most people's social conditioning these days, it's easier said than done but anyone can do it.
To a logical person the easiest take away is that control over your senses / thoughts / perception frees up a lot of your capabilities with which you can do more - whatever that is, money making, art, nothing. You do it while truly enjoying it. It's great if you can pull it off!
Ephemeral? Yes.
Pointless? No: If you are happier, you'll make people around you happier. If everybody tries to achieve that, we'll have a much saner society. Thus, we should take it as our responsibility to achieve a good level of happiness as often as possible (obviously not by making others pay for it).
Once you see the world for what it really is (a dream), all the masks fall away and you're free to go on with your "life" unencumbered by artificial thought creations that another artificial thought creation ("You") thought were real.
When you're doing meditation, especially no-mind meditation, physical processes are irrelevant, indeed the entire world is irrelevant. Looking for explanations or theories or systems in the scientific way is, on one hand, hard/impossible due to subjectivity and on the other, goes against the entire practice since you're inventing even more dualities and thought constructs when you should be tearing everything down!
I've read western mindfulness literature, western zen-buddhist literature and some pieces from tibetan buddhists. All the advice on specific meditation techniques I've read there were sound.
The tibetan buddhist books usually flirt in some places with their traditions which can be a bit off-putting but it seldom affects the meditation itself and is something like "if you practice this 50 years and learn to levitate pleace don't brag about it".
So, zen buddhist or mindfullness books are usually fully fully compatible with a materialistic world view (like mine).
I don't do meditation (and in fact get kind of irritated that practitioners of it seem to imply the only way to get in more control of your brain is through meditation), but I practice CBT. The idea is to be in greater control of your conscious and subconscious processes by being more aware of what's going on in your brain.
For example, I noticed that when people make suggestions on products I work on that have the potential to violate users' privacy, I tend to get defensive and argumentative over that point. Using CBT and practice, first I was able to identify the emotions that rush over me when that happened. Then, I was able to notice and acknowledge those emotions happening and finally I was able to control them and let them pass without influencing my behavior. The last step in the puzzle is finding out why that particular issue is so triggering to me.
After becoming aware of these things, I'm a lot less anxious, my relationships are much stronger, my communication is better, and I'm just in a better mood and happier in general.
I started with Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by Burns, and it's really good but an overwhelming amount of information.
That being said, I do have an appreciation from mindfulness meditation as well as CBT. They complement each other very well. I'd recommend the audiobook Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. It's a really easy way to get started and you'll definitely feel like your life has improved by the time the 8 weeks is up.
Many techniques of contemporary dance, for example, are meditation. They teach you to be aware of your full body in motion, fiber by fiber stretching and contracting, moment by moment. It's meditating on bodily impulses, not consciousness ones, but a trained dancer in action has in any case no consciousness of anything else but her body, rhythm and the abstract meaning (i.e. the image) of that, but those three get dissolved into one in dopamine and that's what people call "incorporating", you lose the sense of self.
That is precisely one of the central practices in the meditation practice I am familiar with.