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wilkox comments on Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 1 of 3) - Less Wrong
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I'm confused by the idea that the kinds of meditation you are talking about have until now been practised by "small and somewhat private groups" in secret. Why would this kind of meditation be taboo? What did these groups have to fear that drove them to secrecy, and why has that changed?
At least in the context of Buddhism-inspired practices, the reasons are threefold...
1) Monks in many (all?) Buddhist traditions are prohibited from discussing their own attainments with non-monks by the rules of their organization.
2) Most (nearly all?) contemporary dharma centers / etc., for various sociocultural reasons, have strong taboos concerning discussion of attainments.
3) If you tell a person in normal society that you are interested in reaching enlightenment, hope to do so soon, or perhaps already have, you are most likely to be written off as mentally ill, a member of a cult, a drug user, or something along those lines.
So, suppose you are a contemporary Westerner interested in learning about and openly talking about meditation and enlightenment. There is almost no context in which this would be socially acceptable, apart from the context of a small group of people who share the same interest and make it a point to keep their interests hidden from the public at large.
The only change that I know of has been that people are willing to talk about all kinds of things on the internet that may be taboo in other contexts, and are better able to find like-minded peers who share their interests. (If you want an example, try talking about the benefits of cryonics in person vs. on LW and see how your reception differs.)
The case might be different with practices associated with non-Buddhist traditions; I wouldn't know.
You use somewhat poetic language when talking about this secrecy and it might be prone to misinterpretation. I'm quite sure there are secretive groups pursuing expertise in meditation if the meaning of secrecy is such that you could replace "expertise in meditation" with, say, "plaing tabletop role-plaing games" without changing the sentence's truth-value. So they meet privately, do their thing and don't talk about it with people who wouldn't get it (most people, that is) because nobody likes to be called weird.
However, the second paragraph of your post made me imagine secret societies, with robes, masks, irregular meetings in remote locations during the darkest hours of the night and other assorted features. For a moment there, I expected to read a genuinely crazy conspiracy theory. I see that this is not the case but I am still slightly bewildered.