Every human being wants happiness. Whether it's money, cool gadgets, attractive significant others, knowledge, volunteer work, exercise, or meditation, the general goal is to feel happy.
Ephemeral? Yes.
Pointless? No: If you are happier, you'll make people around you happier. If everybody tries to achieve that, we'll have a much saner society. Thus, we should take it as our responsibility to achieve a good level of happiness as often as possible (obviously not by making others pay for it).
Once you see the world for what it really is (a dream), all the masks fall away and you're free to go on with your "life" unencumbered by artificial thought creations that another artificial thought creation ("You") thought were real.
When you're doing meditation, especially no-mind meditation, physical processes are irrelevant, indeed the entire world is irrelevant. Looking for explanations or theories or systems in the scientific way is, on one hand, hard/impossible due to subjectivity and on the other, goes against the entire practice since you're inventing even more dualities and thought constructs when you should be tearing everything down!
I've read western mindfulness literature, western zen-buddhist literature and some pieces from tibetan buddhists. All the advice on specific meditation techniques I've read there were sound.
The tibetan buddhist books usually flirt in some places with their traditions which can be a bit off-putting but it seldom affects the meditation itself and is something like "if you practice this 50 years and learn to levitate pleace don't brag about it".
So, zen buddhist or mindfullness books are usually fully fully compatible with a materialistic world view (like mine).