I'm reading a book about Vipassana meditation - a form of Buddhist mediation - and the author is spending quite a bit of time defining his terms. Which makes sense; a lot of possible definitions for meditation are inaccurate (i.e., "MEDITATION GIVES US REAL ULTIMATE POWER. MONKS FLIP OUT AND KILL PEOPLE ALL THE TIME!"), and even the correct ones vary widely (i.e., Vipassana meditation is very different from other styles of meditation). I came across the following:

The second Zen approach used in the Rinzai school is that of tricking the mind out of conscious thought and into pure awareness. This is done by giving the student an unsolvable riddle which he must solve anyway, and by placing him in a horrendous training situation. Since he cannot flee from the pain of the situation, he must flee into a pure experience of the moment. There is nowhere else to go. Zen is tough. It is effective for many people, but it is really tough.

I think MIT was founded by a Zen Buddhist. It is effective, but ... well, as anyone who's tried to drink from a firehose can tell you, it is tough. MIT as a path to enlightenment ... hmm ...