I sat down to write this essay on personal mindfulness, wondered what music was good theme music for it, and put in my cd version of Tom Waits’ Mule Variations. Just thinking about it though, I guess that my point in writing this stuff out is that any music fits if it fits me in the moment. And pretty much anything can “fit me” in the moment if I’m receptive to it. So here we go with a Waits’-influenced version of mindfulness conversation...
The first thing I’d like to say is that I’ll eventually get to anatta or no-self and how that fits with personal mindfulness, but that’s a secondary consideration for most American audiences. When I do psychotherapy with a client, I prefer to try to begin from where they are at that moment rather than beginning from a treatment protocol or philosophical perspective or something along those lines. I think a similar approach is best concerning education and actualization as well.
By speaking in terms of personal mindfulness, I am emphasizing that it is important to have a solid sense of what mindfulness is, a personal feeling or grip on it. What does it mean to you right now? When we learn, we often begin with a general or vague sense of what we’re talking about. That’s usually how people begin with mindfulness. Besides trying to move in on a conceptual understanding, we also tend to internally crystallize awareness of a certain feeling for what something is. You can think of figuring out what it means to love. What is love? Even without an operational definition, most people have at least one feeling that is part of their response. The conceptual definition is not as immediate to what love is as the feelings are. The same goes for mindfulness. It can be helpful to move towards an understanding of mindfulness, it may be impossible to avoid thinking something about it, but the definition is not quite as immediate to what mindfulness actually is as the experience of mindfulness is. This is why I speak of personal mindfulness. Mindfulness is about being right here, and if one is drifting into considerations or opinions or doubt, that tends to be a movement away from mindfulness in the present moment.
Getting a crystal clear sense of what mindfulness is may be helped along by “circling in”. If I can move towards a sense of center, a cohesive or singular core, I might be able to understand what I’m working on better. (This circling in conceptually can end up being a model for how I’ll develop better mindfulness later on in meditation sessions.) In order to understand what mindfulness is–in a situation where one is not simply trying to do it–it can be somewhat helpful to understand what mindfulness is not. This doesn’t really help one be mindful, but it can help to satisfy and quiet one’s doubts. While it is possible to be mindful of doubts, this is not really part of most people’s eventual goal. (It will happen, though, whether it is part of one’s goal or not.)
I’ve found it helpful, in moving towards a crystallization of what mindfulness is, to consider: concentration or singlemindedness, relaxation, intention, bare awareness, and subtle bliss. (From here on out, I’ll just say “bliss”.) If thinking about mindfulness like this is not felt to be helpful to you, do it your way; that is a big part of what Gautama taught as well as the basic gist of this essay. Thinking can be good for removing doubts. Bare awareness may be the most helpful experience to differentiate from mindfulness, but I didn’t find or develop this experience until later on. So I’ll start here with concentration.
Developmentally, we learn intentional concentration when we want something like mom, or we want a cookie, or we want to be able to crawl or walk to something interesting. In my understanding, then, concentration is basic or fundamental or primary to the rest of these items. We learn to keep something in our awareness even while there might be obstacles to overcome or time that we need to wait through. We learn persistence with concentration. If mom doesn’t show up right away, you see kids re-assess the situation and decide whether to keep putting effort into crying or not. Sometimes, they persist. Just as we might eventually learn to practice mindfulness, kids learn to practice persistence and concentration. At an expert level, concentration becomes singlemindedness. We focus our field of awareness down to a single attentive point. Mindfulness is not singlemindedness.
As we continue to grow, we figure out just how smart we are. We are smart beings. So we can get a lot done by being creative and focused. Once it sinks in that we are pretty smart, we start to realize just how valuable learning is. When we pursue a desire to understand, we run into things we don’t understand and we run into paradoxes. Some paradoxes only unravel when we can sit with them for a while without trying to really tinker with them. In other words, sometimes the answer just comes out of having a contemplative state of mind–rather than coming from us trying to force our way through a problem. In order to allow a sense of contemplation rather than a persistence of mental force, we have to learn to intentionally relax. With contemplation, we relax enough so that speed or force of attention is not primary, but we relax somewhat without completely letting go of whatever we’re paying attention to. With deeper relaxation, we might let go of paying attention to a solid form of anything and drop into an absorptive state. Mindfulness is not contemplation or relaxation.
Intention is somewhat different than concentration and relaxation. When we are first learning to concentrate (I want a cookie!), we tend to focus a great deal of our attention with a great deal of effort or force. As we learn to relax, we work on keeping our focus without putting in so much force. We trade out effort for intention. People sometimes think of this as learning patience. Since I would rather be mindful when I am waiting than try to feel patient, I prefer to focus on intention and mindfulness rather than patience. Patience is for saints and martyrs, and that’s not me. Intention, then, has a focus. You have to intend something. I intend to get a cookie, or I intend to finish an essay. Intention, because it involves movement towards a goal, always at least implies a sense of self–even if that sense of self may be background. When I intend to get a cookie, I don’t necessarily intend for you to have one, and my attention is not fully invested in just paying attention to a cookie without getting to it and eating it. So intention is not singlemindedness. I would say that because intention is defined by being reliant on a sense of self, even if background, intention is also not mindfulness because it is possible to be mindful without retaining a sense of self.
When people practice mindfulness mediation, they often learn to experience a sense of space around themselves and/or within their experience. It becomes possible to notice many different things without feeling locked into or constrained by those different things. We can practice paying attention to each thing or moment as it comes into awareness without feeling directly connected to it, without reacting to it. That is bare attention. We just notice one thing at a time, one thought, one moment. If we expand that attentive focus, rather than paying attention to one thing at a time, if we can also keep that nonjudgemental and open quality about many things in awareness at once, this is what I understand to be bare awareness. Bare awareness probably has some very specific neurophysiological correlates but I don’t know what they are. I believe it is possible to experience bare awareness and awareness of almost anything else as well, or to experience bare awareness of nearly anything. Because I believe that bare awareness involves a certain brightness of awareness that is probably characterized by a certain degree or type of synchronization of brainwaves, something that occurs mostly in the cortex, I do not believe it to be mindfulness. I think that mindfulness is simpler, more basic, than bare awareness. Mindfulness can apply in a moment where we are very focused, like on a single thing, or when we are open to many influences or many things in awareness. I think of mindfulness as probably being what Zen Master Dogen called thinking nonthinking.
The sense of openness or space, in comparison to the suffering that occurs when one desires but does not have one’s wishes fulfilled, leads to a sense of bliss. This particular bliss that I’m referring to is subtler than ecstasy (like we experience when dancing for a long time), most orgasms, and the sort of rapture that people feel when they get wrapped up in a sense of spiritual connection with art or nature. Like bare awareness, I believe this bliss can be present in almost any situation. Just as intention implies a goal and a reference to self, bliss implies someone who experiences the bliss. While I enjoy and appreciate all of these various different items, none of them are mindfulness. In comparison to bliss, mindfulness does not necessarily have a subtle feeling nor does it necessarily refer to a sense of self. Mindfulness can seem to occur without awareness of or implication of anyone being mindful. It seems to exist as an objective quality, to stand on its own. Whereas some of these other influences on one’s internal states will have signature patterns of brainwaves, mixes of neurotransmitters, or structural activation in the brain, mindfulness may actually be characterized by an absence of particular activities or connections, maybe by a particular type of synchronization; whether this is or is not an accurate guess, I do believe it will be eventually possible to delineate mindfulness as having a neurological fingerprint.
If we know some of what mindfulness is not, what is mindfulness? I would say that it is a quality of awareness. Because it is potentially central to any moment of awareness, because it is difficult to conceptually put one’s finger on, it is something that each person must come into relationship with in their own way. Just as experiences of satori an nirvana defy explanation, mindfulness–rather than being too lofty or intense or unique to be explained well–defies explanation for always being potentially present, and sometimes actually present. It may make more sense to try to understand how one personally approaches mindfulness rather than trying to describe mindfulness. Because it is always alive, as opposed to information or ideas that can be written down and archived, descriptions tend to be unsatisfactory in comparison to a crystallization of experience, first-hand “knowledge” of what mindfulness is. This is why I speak of personal mindfulness. You might describe it differently than I do, but the descriptions don’t matter much, except in possibly inviting someone else into the experience.
In my experience, mindfulness is the most basic experience of existence: “am” or “is”. How do I know that I am? Well, that question may be interesting philosophically or in some other way, but I know. There is a basic feeling of awareness that I call mindfulness. Now, it is possible to go through most of one’s life without being mindful, so my definition definitely raises a certain conundrum, but I stick by what I’m saying here. Mindfulness is awareness of presence. I can be aware of my presence, or I can pay attention to something else being present. Mindfulness is nothing more than awareness of presence, regardless of what the object(s) of attention is, regardless of whether presence includes a feeling of personality.
Without adequate experience, this may seem paradoxical, but it is not. Mindfulness is simpler than paradox, within paradox and anything else. Because it is simpler, it does not include judgment, thinking, opinionation, preference, etc. Because it is basic to any of this, it is potentially included within thinking, judgment, opinionation, memory or planning, etc. So there is a difference between being intentionally mindful of something and the basic, vital awareness–before and within any choice to be intentional–and mindfulness itself. It can help to crystallize this basic experience for oneself, but it is what it is with or without crystallization, with or without the intention to be mindful at any given moment.
What all this means, then, is that intentional mindfulness practice involves pouring one’s attention into a potentially stable or flexible vitality that is simpler than any thing that can be described. The practice and development of one’s personal mindfulness, then, involves paying attention to anything mindfully. If you want to include mindfulness as a more consistent or potent part of your experience, it helps to practice consistency of attention and intensity of attention and clarity of attention. Describing mindfulness as a balance between focus and receptivity can be helpful if it is taken the right way. We can know ourselves as unmindful if we are too focused or too passive. Between one extreme and another, there is a middle way. I don’t believe this middle way is Buddhist particularly or only, but Gautama did a nice job of directing people to mindfulness. If you can be mindful of Tom Waits, Tom Waits can do a nice job of directing you to mindfulness.
When we begin to intentionally develop a sense of internal balance, we come to a point where we realize we have to learn balance in relationship to external circumstances as they come and go, but we may also be able to practice internal balance in spite of difficult external circumstances. As we practice internal balance, we begin to experience mindfulness more or less intentionally, sometimes when we put effort into being mindful, sometimes when we find mindfulness more gracefully. We first have moments wherein we recognize this mindfulness thing or process, and we then learn to stretch these moments out, to connect them, to recognize mindfulness as a quality that is always present at least in potentia. It is present in actuality, present in my awareness, when we recognize it, when I recognize it.
In my understanding, then, mindfulness practice can lead one to experiences and understanding of no-self, anatta, sunyata, etc. Mindfulness practice can also lead on to a more vital experience of parenting, working, cooking, whatever. Rather than preferring a doctrinal focus or a focus on sitting meditation, I prefer an effective approach. I believe that exploring mindfulness as a reality and a possibility can be very beneficial to everyone or nearly everyone. What do you know of mindfulness? I believe this is the place to begin. Where are you? How? Be alive. If you are alive, you are an invitation to mindfulness. Accept your invitation. Accept every invitation.
Copyright 2007 Todd Mertz