Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated is detailed, non-mystical and seems to have a solid following with an active /r/TheMindIlluminated subreddit. /r/streamentry subreddit seems to also be pretty focused.
Rob Burbea and Shinzen Young have also written a bunch of non-vague, non-mystical stuff and seem to be well regarded.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/meditation/about...
I really like the website/app called Waking Up by Sam Harris, I think it fits your description.
Why is it a taboo unless you totally secularise it? I’m not following. Meditation comes from a religious context, and I don’t see why it’s a taboo just because that context remains
Further, the secular mindfulness and meditation movements are huge, and there are many serious secular oriented meditation books (TMI, MCTB, etc. tho I’m not personally a fan of them)
I have seen no evidence of this. Many religious practices involve meditation. But they also commonly involve song; it doesn’t follow that singing comes from a religious context.
If you look for the oldest written songs, they’re invariably religious. The evidence used to establish meditation as religiously derived is sufficient to prove the same for song.
In fact, with the evidence at hand, I could just as easily argue that all religion derives from meditation. Secularly speaking, that is a simpler hypothesis than the inverse.
> all modern meditation comes from religious sources
I said modern organised practices of meditation come from religious sources. That caveat is as big as the difference between organised religion and sprituality, generally.
> The earliest written records of meditation come from the Hindu Vedas around 1500 BCE (Sharma, 2015). The Torah also contains a description of the patriarch Isaac going to “lasuach” in a field, a kind of Jewish meditation most likely practiced around 1000 BCE (Kaplan, 1985).
> I have seen no evidence of this.
That doesn't imply no evidence. In fact, there is tons of evidence that meditation originated from a religious context. It is not even controversial.
Do we need a let me Google Scholar that for you? Meditation is intensely researched by serious people not beholden to pseudoscience.
Here is a hospital promoting meditation:
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/mental-...
Journal on mindfulness:
https://www.springer.com/journal/12671
Meditation research group Harvard:
Email me if interested (address in profile).
Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?
I'd say the absence of those indicates that there is in fact an implicit taboo attached to practicing meditation for the sake of meditation itself.