IMHO, you're making the common mistake thinking that meditation is about sitting still and thinking about nothing, or lazily observing your thoughts. Meditation has one specific goal: training to focus your mind. Meditation is when you pick a simple static object and try to visualize it in front of you with all details, with eyes open and lights on. Yes, that's right. The goal is to visualize it so well that it would be no different than looking at it with your eyes. There are many common difficulties there: the object will be disappearing, floating away, transforming into something else, getting too blurry or too dim. But eventually youll be able to visualize more and more complex objects, then switch to complex ideas and finally reach the state when you're fully focused at all times without effort. Meditation is more like yoga and it is pretty exhaustive if you bother to put effort into this and not just sit and stare into a wall.
That's one specific type of meditation. More broadly, meditation can be used to further a wide variety of goals.
For example, Aleister Crowley taught a type of insight meditation that was intended to increase one's personal power over others. His technique was very similar to the one I was taught, which was supposed to be for developing insight into the emptiness of all phenomena.
Maybe. Meditation can be about doing nothing. In fact, not even doing that. See: shikentaza, and a theravada monk advised just that to me last night ;)
