From Coming to Our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn, in the chapter "Two Ways to Think About Meditation":

This other way of describing meditation is that whatever "meditation" is, it is not instrumental at all. If it is a method, it is the method of no method. It is not a doing. There is no going anywhere, nothing to practice, no beginning, middle, or end, no attainment, and nothing to attain. Rather, it is the direct realization and embodiment in this very moment of who you already are, outside of time and space and concepts of any kind, a resting in the very nature of your being, in what is sometimes called the natural state, original mind, pure awareness, no mind, or simply emptiness. You are already everything you may hope to attain, so no effort of the will is necessary—even for the mind to come back to the breath—and no attachment is possible. You are already it. It is already here. There is no time, no space, no body, and no mind, to paraphrase Kabir. And there is no purpose to meditation—it is the one human activity (non-activity really) that we engage in for its own sake—for no purpose other than to be awake to what is actually so.

^z - 2010-01-21