9. What Is Mindfulness

I’d like to take a few minutes to clarify the concept of mindfulness. Because I and many other people use this term and a variety of ways, we can use it to describe a state of mind, or a property of the mind, or a kind of action or behavior. And needless to say, a type of meditation practice. And it’s easily conflated with other terms like meditation, or concentration, attention, awareness, consciousness, focus, cognition, perception. And it’s also entangled with many other attributes, like tranquility, and insight, and wisdom, and awakening, being in the present moment. So there’s kind of a word cloud of associations here.

First, we should recognize that people use these terms slightly differently depending on the context. So awareness is often a synonym for consciousness. But it can also be a synonym for mindfulness.

There’s a basic distinction between mindfulness and its antithesis, which is something like mind lessness, distraction, a lack of awareness.

Mindfulness is a translation of a Pali term Sati, which even in Pali is an overloaded term, it can also mean remembering or recollection. So it doesn’t always refer to a non conceptual, direct awareness of the contents of consciousness, it can mean recalling one’s priorities, the fact that awakening might be a value that supersedes others, or behaving ethically might write reflecting on that, deciding that certain types of thoughts are not worth indulging, that is also considered within Buddhist teaching, a kind of coarse grained mindfulness, again, it’s generally speaking, an awareness of what one is paying attention to, moment by moment, right, attention is its own thing, attention is like a spotlight within a larger field of consciousness.

So there’s the total field of what you could possibly be aware of, in this moment, there are sights and sounds and sensations, thoughts and emotions appearing on their own. And you can decide, it would seem to pay attention to something. And that focus. That’s what we mean by attention.

Before you learned anything about mindfulness, or meditation, you were still paying attention to something more or less every waking moment. So attention bounces around to the objects of perception, and cognition. And it’s impressively colored by various mental states of liking and not liking the character of experience. And so it’s this ordinary hardware of attention, that we begin to train in mindfulness practice, and in the beginning to strategically place attention on various objects, like the breath, or sound. And the training immediately becomes one of noticing the distinction between being lost and thought, having one’s attention diverted from the chosen object of meditation into thought, and the opposite of that, which is to successfully place attention on the breath, or any other object. So it’s this repeated placing of attention. That is the initial training, and that is in fact training in what is called concentration. Within the Buddhist teachings. submeter or shamita, in Pali, and Sanskrit.

Concentration and mindfulness are not the same, but you need a certain degree of concentration to successfully practice mindfulness. You can take this concentration practice much further - you can place attention on a single object, whether the breath or the mental state of loving kindness in metta practice, or any object in your visual field. It literally can be anything. You can place attention on a single object so successfully, that the character of your conscious experience begins to radically change, thoughts no longer arise. And very positive emotions of rapture and bliss begin to flood the mind. It becomes incredibly pleasurable to have a concentrated mind. And there’s a whole stream of practice in various contemplative traditions around becoming a kind of athlete of concentration and of course, concentration is a wonderfully useful property of the mind to have in any other area of life. To be able to concentrate on one’s work, or when playing a sport is a very good thing to be able to do. And you need some significant concentration to be able to practice mindfulness successfully. But fairly early on in the practice, one no longer attempts to focus on one object to the exclusion of anything else. One simply wants to kind of momentary concentration, which enables you to notice whatever In fact, you do notice. So your attention can flit from object to object. And as long as you are clearly perceiving those objects, sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, well, then that is the successful application of mindfulness.

But again, it’s attention that is not colored by grasping or aversion. You’re merely accepting what is arising with an open and curious and clear scene, right. So it does have an attitude, or at least it has a market absence of certain other attitudes, like fear, and craving. It’s a balanced kind of attention.

And in the context of this course, I tend to think about mindfulness in two stages.

And the first is what I sometimes call ordinary or conventional, or dualistic mindfulness. And this is the mindfulness that almost everyone starts with, is the mindfulness you practice when the feeling of self is one starting point, there’s a feeling that there is a subject that can direct attention, a meditator, a thinker of thoughts. And even with that dualism in place, there can still be a profound distinction between being mindful and being distracted. There are all those moments where you’ve forgotten that you’re even supposed to be meditating. And then there are those moments where you return attention to the breath, or to sound, or anything else that’s appearing in consciousness. And it’s that fluctuation between being lost in thought, and being clearly aware of something that is the practice of mindfulness. And this first stage itself can be divided into two stages, or at least mindfulness at this stage can have two characters, there can be a very deliberate form of mindfulness and a spontaneous form. Right, it can feel like something you’re doing, or it can feel like something that’s happening naturally, it can be effortful, or it can be effortless. It can be fabricated, right? It really seems like it’s a kind of mental behavior, or gesture, or it can be unfabricated, it can seem a kind of natural property of consciousness. And so with practice, even dualistic mindfulness, where the sense of subject-object perception is still preserved, that can begin to feel more spontaneous, more effortless, less, like you’re doing anything at all, when you meditate.

And then there’s a second stage, which I often indicate, in various ways in this course. And that’s the stage at which the illusion of self gets cut through with a sense that there’s a subject at the center of consciousness falls away. And that experience of openness and centerlessness, at that point, becomes synonymous with mindfulness, which is to say that when you’re truly paying attention to anything, what is clear in those moments. Is it there’s no one doing it. Everything is simply happening. Everything is arising on its own thoughts, intentions, emotions, and vanishing. And this prior condition of consciousness, in which all of that’s happening, doesn’t itself feel like I, it doesn’t feel like a self. And so in that context, one speaks and thinks less about mindfulness as a kind of behavior, or practice, or even state of mind. And one tends to speak more about the nature of consciousness itself. And this is where other terms begin to seem relevant. One talks about insight, or wisdom, or awakening, right is a thing that is being realized by the successful application of mindfulness, right, it’s what’s there to be seen, or the illusions that are cut through and to close here, maybe it’ll take a minute to build this up, experientially.

So if your eyes are closed at this moment, open them And pick an object in your visual field and focus on it. So now you’re trying to narrow your attention to a single object. And you can see it clearly. Presumably, I’m looking at an icon on the desktop of my computer. And it’s right in the center of my visual field. It is more in focus than anything else that I can see. But the first thing to notice here is that it’s not the only thing I see. I’m trying to look at it to the exclusion of everything else. But I also notice that there’s more to my visual field than the single icon. So the rest of my visual field is also appearing in consciousness. But my attention is aimed at a single object of perception. so here we can differentiate attention from awareness, or consciousness. And it’s from this wider field of consciousness, that something might intrude something might capture my attention and pull it away from this object that I’m focusing on. Now, mindfulness here is just the clear scene of all of this, right? I’m aware of my focus on this object. I’m also aware of my wider experience, right? And I’m aware of the precariousness of this, I’m aware that thoughts are buffeting my attention, threatening to pull me away. I’m also aware of other perceptions, sensations in my body. Sounds right now, insofar as all of this is clear, and unencumbered by a reaction. Insofar as I’m not grasping at what’s pleasant here or pushing what’s unpleasant away. Right? That is mindfulness, the moment to moment tracking of the character of my experience. Now again, if I got more and more concentrated on the object of my attention, this icon on my desktop, then my perceptual experience would begin to change, right, the rest of my visual field could fade away entirely. And my sense of having a body could also fade away, and thoughts could cease to arise. And that could be a very pleasant, drug like experience. And that’s what many people mean, by meditation, the attainment of that kind of one pointedness. Right. But that’s not mindfulness practice, or insight, practice. Vipassana is the Pali word for insight. That’s not what’s considered wisdom practice within the Buddhist tradition, rather than goal of wisdom, is to use a sufficient degree of concentration to notice things about the nature of mind, in general. So again, I’m looking at this icon on the screen of my computer. And now I can shift to looking at my visual field as a whole. Right now, I’m not trying to narrow my visual attention. Rather, I’m trying to take in the entire scene, even the periphery, as a single continuum of color and shadow. This is what I refer to in various practice sessions as leaving your attention very wide. Right, so widening your visual perception to include the entire field. Now, I’m still focused on scene. But my experience has a slightly different character. There’s no narrowing of focus. And again, the conventional practice of mindfulness here, will tend to still presume that there’s a one who has seen that there’s a meditator, it will still feel like attention. However wide, is on one side of this experience of seeing. I’m over here behind my eyes, looking out at an expanse of color and shadow. But this second stage of mindfulness is achieved when you look for that seat of attention. Or you look for your head, to put it in the framework that Douglas Harding used, and what you could find Richard Lange, exploring in his track on the app, and then failing to find that center, to awareness, and failing to find it conclusively. So that you have the experience of the center, being absent. There’s an experience of open awareness that eventually becomes synonymous. with one’s mindfulness. And this is where I tend to talk about non dual or non dualistic mindfulness.

But again at every stage, and even in the very beginning, mindfulness is the antithesis of the antidote for distraction, and identification with thought. It is the thing that breaks the spell, and returns us to direct awareness of what’s appearing in the present. So hope that was helpful. Again, many of these terms can be loosely defined and used with slightly different shadings of meaning in various contexts. But hopefully this gives you some clarification about how I use them in the waking up course,