Relaxation can be achieved when a person is concentrating to relax; meditation can be achieved when a person is reaching a totality of consciousness without focussing on any task, or on any specific topic and thus achieving a reduction of unwanted mental interferences.
Meditation: to de-concentrate or to lose any notion of content, of thoughts, of self - and this without losing alertness or mental clarity.
This definition of meditation causes – as expected – serious problems to our daily concept of mental functioning. It is not easy to understand and accept that one would be able to re-direct attention away from all thoughts, perception and mental content whilst the person is practising at the same time the procedures and techniques of meditation, which have to be learned and understood.
Secondly, the mental experience that is the result of these meditation techniques is totally beyond common explanation. In fact, the impossibility to describe the very experience is an ever re - occurring theme in the topical literature.
Mental training on attention as well as on de-concentration will result in a better control and filtering of mental interference, uncontrolled and originating from inside and which makes from the mind a noisy place where it is not easy to think with clarity, nor to distinguish the essential from the trivial.