Buddhism is generally referred to as a religion in the Western world, but that's a bit misleading, at least to the extent that religion is understood as a faith-based belief in a supernatural power (or powers). The Mahayana and Therevada strains of Buddhism are better understood as practices than as religions. Where Abrahamic religions, for instance, would have you base your actions on the beliefs they proclaim, Buddhism would have you derive your beliefs from the actions it suggests. It's based not on faith, but on experiential verification. This is slightly complicated by the fact that this verification is injunctive rather than empirical. Thus, it looks less legitimate to Westerners schooled in the scientific method because it lacks the distinction between subject and object, observer and observed, or scientist and experiment necessary to that method. But anyone following Buddhism's injunctions can verify for themselves their effectiveness. Having achieved whatever insight those injunctions yield, the practitioner will then develop their beliefs from that experience.

The central aspect of Buddhist practice is meditation, the goal of which is mindfulness. Mindfulness isn't a type of concentration or intellection--it's the ultimate awareness, without limitation, analysis, or judgment. It's knowing apart from thinking. I understand what those words mean, but I have no experience of what they represent. For me, being conscious is thinking. I've found it easiest to understand my consciousness as the "voice in my head." For most of my life, I've identified with that voice as my fundamental self, the subject of all of my experiences. But after a few years of therapy, I've come to see that: 1) that voice is a composite of all sorts of sensations, drives, impulses, and memories; 2) even an internal monologue has a listener; and 3) that listener is a far better (more stable, more unified, and more constant) candidate for my essential self. In those terms, to achieve mindfulness is to separate the listener from the voice and identify with the listener. It's the voice that thinks, but the listener that knows. Identifying with the voice, I've thought and thought without knowing. Identifying with the listener would allow me to know without thinking.

This is easier said than done, especially for someone who can't understand himself except as what he thinks. My first attempts at meditation were guided by the instructions of a meditation instructor at New York's Shambhala Center, the central precept of which was that as a thought arises, simply note it and let it go. Again, I think I understand what those words mean, but the instructor might as well have suggested that I levitate. I can't do something without thinking it, so I can't let a thought go without thinking: "I'm letting a thought go, and now I'm thinking about letting a thought go, and now I'm thinking about that, so this isn't really letting a thought go, but what would it mean to let a thought go," and so on and on. In The Spectrum of Consciousness, Ken Wilber mentions two other approaches that I find interesting, one described by Hubert Benoit and the other described by Sri Ramana Maharishi:

If I take up, in the face of my inner monologue, the attitude of of an active auditor who authorises this monologue to say whatever it wishes and however it wishes, if I take up the attitude which can be defined by the formula "Speak, I am listening," I observe that my monologue stops. It does not start up again until my attitude of vigilant expectation ceases.

Let us suppose, for example, that I ask you, "Who are you?"... As your mind keeps turning back in on itself in search of the answer, it gets quieter and quieter. If I kept asking, "Who are you? Who are you?" you would quickly enter a mental silence...

I can see how both of those techniques (both of those upayas) might lead to mindfulness, but my attempts at those approaches haven't been any more successful than my attempts at the Shambhala Center's approach. Yet I understand that this is a practice and I'm not yet even a novice. I'm not going to simply abandon the effort after a few unsuccessful attempts. I understand the goal, and that goal seems attainable and valuable enough to justify a concerted effort, which I'm going to make. And having made that decision, I've been playing with the practice of meditation more informally, and those attempts have actually led to far more promising experiences than any of my formal attempts.