Watch What You're Doing by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (extract)

"We’re not making the mind still simply to have a nice restful place to be, a nice experience of ease to soothe our stressed-out nerves. That may be part of it, but it’s not the whole practice. The other part is to see clearly what’s going on, to see the potential of human action: What are we doing all the time? What are the potentials contained in this doing? Then we apply that understanding of human action to see how far we can go in stripping away the unnecessary stress and suffering that come from acting in unskillful ways.

It’s important that we always keep this in mind as we meditate. Remember: We’re here to understand human action, in particular our own human actions. Otherwise we sit here hoping that we don’t have to do anything, that we can just wait for some Imax experiences to come whap us upside the head, or some nice glowing sense of oneness to come welling up inside. And sometimes things like that can come unexpectedly, but if they come without your understanding how or why they came, they’re not all that helpful. They’re restful for a while, or amazing for a while, but then they go away and you have to deal with your desire to get them back. And, of course, no amount of desire is going to get them back if it’s not accompanied by understanding.

You can’t totally drop human action until you understand the nature of action. This is really important. We like to think that we can simply stop doing, stop doing, stop doing, and things will settle down, get calm, and open up to emptiness. But that’s more like zoning out than meditating. There is an element of stopping in the meditation, an element of letting go, but you can’t really master it until you understand what you’re trying to stop, what you’re letting go. So try to watch out for that. When you come out of a good meditation, don’t simply get up and go back to the kitchen, have a cocoa, and go back to sleep. Reflect on what you did so as to understand the pattern of cause and effect, to see exactly what you fabricated in the process of bringing the mind down to a state of calm. After all, the path is a fabricated path. It’s the ultimate fabrication. As the Buddha said, of all the fabricated phenomena there are in the world, the highest is the noble eightfold path. This is the path we’re trying to follow right now. It’s something put together, and you won’t understand it until you see the putting-together as you’re doing it.

So always have that in the back of your mind: that you are doing something here. Sometimes it seems frustrating that the whole hour may be spent just pulling back, pulling back, pulling the mind back to the breath. It wanders off, so you pull it back again, and then it wanders — when is the peace and calm going to come? Well, before it can come you have to develop some understanding. So when you pull it back, try to understand what you’re doing. When it wanders off, try to understand what’s happening, what you did to encourage or allow it to wander off. In particular, try to uncover all the skillful and unskillful intentions that go into this back-and-forth process. When you understand how the mind goes back and forth, you’ll reach the point where you can keep it from going back and forth. At the same time, you’ll develop the kind of insight we want in the meditation: insight into actions."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Watch What You're Doing" (Meditations1)