Buddhist Insight Meditation - WATCH WHAT YOU'RE DOING

"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.

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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 in as you're doing it.

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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.

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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..."