It’s never a question of just sitting there and looking at whatever comes up in the mind. You’re trying to get the mind to act in as skillful a way as possible in its thoughts, its words, and its deeds.

"So we’re not here to be as passive as possible, to say that we’re seeing things just as they are. Look at the way the Buddha approached awakening. He didn’t just sit there passively. He tried different approaches. He focused his mind in different places. He took different things as the themes of his meditation. Then he evaluated the results. How did it work? What was he able to do? And what was not up to his expectations? Then the question always was, “What am I doing wrong?” He would turn around and check out other possibilities. He experimented, which meant that he had to act and then look at the results of his actions, pass judgment on them, and then decide what to do next based on that judgment.

It was through this process of committing himself to doing what he thought was the wisest and most skillful thing to do and then reflecting on the results that he was able to come up with some good standards for judgment. And that’s what the four noble truths are, standards for judgment: Which kinds of actions are worth doing, which ones are not worth doing, which kinds of actions lead to suffering, which kinds of actions lead away? By applying that framework, he found that he could learn an awful lot about how things function and how he could steer their functioning in the direction of the end of suffering.

So this is why we meditate. If the problem of suffering were caused by sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations, we’d have to go out and change them. But here it’s actually caused by the activities we bring to sensory contact, and those activities are happening in the mind. This is why the meditation aims inside, does its work inside. Now, in some cases, we start the work outside and move in. In other words, we practice generosity, we observe the precepts, and that trains the mind. Then we use that trained mind to look deeper into the mind.

But it’s never a question of just sitting there and looking at whatever comes up in the mind. You’re trying to get the mind to act in as skillful a way as possible in its thoughts, its words, and its deeds. Then you learn from what you’ve done in the quest to create even more skill, which is why the insights that you gain from acting in this way are insights about action: the power of action, the nature of causality, insight into how things function, especially when you can get them to function in the best way possible."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Things as They Function"