The Buddha wanted you to see meditation as a kind of action that you want to master to the point of real skill.

"Years back, I was giving a talk to a group of people on the topic of karma. They’d been meditating and most of them had the impression that karma was something superfluous in the Buddha’s teachings, something that had nothing to do with their meditation. So I pointed out that you have to look at your meditation as a kind of action: You’re creating karma by focusing on the breath, you’re creating karma by spreading thoughts of goodwill [mettā]. It’s good karma, but you want to learn how to do it even more and more skillfully.

I was getting a lot of blank looks from the audience as I said this, and I found out later that the type of meditation they’d been doing was one where you’re not supposed to be doing anything at all. You were supposed to allow whatever’s going to happen to happen and take a totally passive, accepting role to what was happening.

But that’s not how the Buddha taught meditation. He said he wanted you to see meditation as a kind of action that you want to master to the point of real skill. Even when things get very refined, very still in the mind, there are always these questions: “Is there any unnecessary stress here and, if so, what are you doing to cause it? What action is causing it? Can you drop that action?” This is how you get into deeper stages of concentration, deeper and deeper levels of discernment."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Truthful & Observant"

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