1.20.11 part 15 section 1-Transcript of Meditation Session using Mindfulness based breathing
First an explanation of what mindfulness is and isn’t. Mindfulness is the present moment experience of anything, accepting it for what it is, and allowing it to unfold as it is meant to be in reality. Mindfulness is pre cognitive that is before thinking, it uses sensing and feeling rather than thought. Mindfulness is experiencing reality as it really is in the present moment, before thinking about it changes it based on past experience or future wants or expectations, and before our emotions change the experience based on their positive, negative or neutral flavor. Mindfulness isn’t thinking that uses the past, present and the future, and processes like comparing, controlling, changing, expecting, to understand and analyze, further the thinking doing-mind uses our emotional reactions positive , negative or neutral to color and thus change the reality of anything. Mindfulness is pure present moment awareness, experiencing the thing for what is really is in reality, staying always in the present, moment by moment, never going into the past or future, and rather than changing or controlling based on thinking, it accepts the reality of thing for what it is, and allows its wave like nature to unfold, not being influenced by emotional reactions. For example Mindfulness of a sound is just hearing the physical sensation of the, not judging it good, bad or neutral based on past or present experience, or colored by emotions. The same would be applied to a thought or a feeling, or a physical sensation like pain or in our case breathing sensations. The thought, or feeling, or the pain, or the breathing sensations are just accepted and allowed for what they are in the present without further thought, or emotional coloring.
Sustaining mindfulness, that is being mindful moment my moment, while being focused on one experience, it could be any experience, become mindfulness based meditation.
There are two parts to the meditation, the concentrative part, the actual focusing on the object for our purposes the breath, over and over again. This is the part that calms and stabilizes the mind, and as a bonus one can experience some very pleasant feelings and sensations. The concentrative part prepares the mind for the learning part.
The second part is the insight or learning part, where one experiences the true characteristics of the object one is focusing or meditating on, learning through direct experience . The more one focuses and then experiences the object the one understands its true nature progressively from superficial to deeper levels. On the deepest level one becomes aware of and experiences on the precognitive level , through feelings, sensations, moods, instincts and intuitions, the most universal aspects of the object, primarily that everything is wave like, is impermanent, having a beginning, middle and end, and that nothing conditioned can exist by itself in itself as a separate entity without multiple if not an infinite connections and inter dependence on many other things, if not all things, and to not to understand, experience, this can only add to suffering and take away from the pleasure of the thing.
In fact mindfulness makes everything better, positives become more pleasurable, negatives have less suffering, and the neutral becoming interesting rather than boring.