I don't understand why these questions are being down-voted; I think they are pretty legit:

Is meditation just a shortcut to the flow state?

I'm also suspicious of guided meditations; I listen to audio books, how is a guided meditation different? Is a movie provably different?

I'm not dissing meditation; I do a breathe focused meditation nearly daily and I occasionally do guided meditations (I'll try these tonight), but there's a large number of practices that loosely fall into the category of meditation and also a large number of possibly worthwhile activities that are booted out. Most people (including me) never seem to question the why of this separation.