Johnny Froth:
...at the moment the only local meditation center I can find is [something other than this cool thing I have been reading about elsewhere].
Brother, you are so not alone! Anywhere in the world, surely we can give enormous benefit-of-the-doubt to any group of people who care enough about any of the kinds of things we might care about (personal improvement, attaining enlightenment, eradicating suffering, finding God, helping others...) to have gone to the effort to establish and run a meditation centre, and to welcome newcomers and/or outsiders to sit and/or play with them. And then we start to notice the details. I am starting to think that this might be like a parable for the entire "waking up" game.
Johnny Froth:
Now to my beginner's eyes, meditation is meditation is meditation, and the chanting and stuff they do is at worst just superfluous cultural fluff that won't do any harm.
As others have already commented, yes and no. At the very least, meditation is either concentration
(samatha) or insight (vipassana) -- or some "jhanic" both/together fusion -- and the distinctions resolve into a panoramic spectrum including that particular band of the spectrum wherein meditators, if asked, deny that they are meditating at all. People are funny, including, dare I say, you and me.
As for the chanting, some people think that the actual "vibrations" of the chanting have some special quasi-magical beneficial qualities; others think that the experience of the chanting offers an opportunity to meditate with an awareness of the vocalization; yet others think that the content of the chants themselves is helpful (notwithstanding that it is all in some incomprehensible foreign and/or ancient language). Personally, I find chanting beautiful but not while I am trying to meditate, thank you very much. I am leaving in two days for a 10-day course where there is some chanting in the mornings; I intend to meditate elsewhere and am very grateful that it is optional.
I believe that "cultural fluff" is generally misunderstood. The greatest need of any human being is to make sense of the world, but not everybody's way of doing so will make sense to everybody else. Their quasi-religious, trance-inducing, meaning-soaked, highly formalized, and rather sacred behaviour may be "fluff" to you. Your critically analytic, Internet-searching, borderline-irreverent, skeptical enthusiasm... well, for all you know they might have an entire technical vocabulary to describe that from their point of view.
Meanwhile, sitting with others is extremely helpful for all kinds of reasons which at least include the obvious ones having to do with motivation, structure, discipline, and stamina.
And just to validate what you said, yes it makes less difference to a beginner where they start or how they try to proceed. However, I don't get the impression from the energy that you are pouring into this that you are going to remain any kind of utter "beginner" for very long.
Johnny Froth:
I have a bad back and when meditating I sit in a chair...
I have given this question an
enormous amount of consideration. My back is fine, but I am six and a half feet tall and my knees are delicate. When I started meditating ten years ago my options were limited for quite some time. I too used a chair until I made a custom bench for myself. Over many years, I have trained myself gradually to be able to sit, as I now can, on a cushion in a "normal" lotus. Along the way I have developed a
fully adjustable meditation bench which I imagined would be useful for people in
exactly your situation, although I have not developed the business or brought the DanaBench to market. I am now ambivalent about whether doing so would be genuinely helpful, or whether it would just give people one more consumer product to screw around with and project their blame onto instead of doing a few 10's or a hundred or two hundred hours of disciplined and focused training.
My point is that lot of people start out sitting in chairs, and many of them (like me) do progress to sitting much like "everybody else" with time and practice. If this is your path, then just sit any way you can, log lots and lots of "cushion" time, keep asking questions, accept what is offered that is helpful, help others along the way if you can, and enjoy the ride!