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Dharmette: Satipaṭṭhāna (2) Knowing in a New Way

I am struck by all the greetings and good mornings, good days. One, I think, is in Portuguese. Maybe tomorrow when we gather, all of you who speak whatever your native language is, if you want to offer the greetings in your native language—in English certainly, and any other—it would be fun to see all the different languages of greeting. So, I offer you a warm hello from Redwood City here at IMC in our second gathering for the new year.

One of the things that we are discovering in mindfulness practice is a new relationship to our capacity to be aware. We are discovering something new about attention. Attention and awareness are things that many of us will use throughout the day unselfconsciously, without much attention, and it kind of needs to be that way. We get through the day more efficiently if we just don't have to think about being aware so much. But in mindfulness practice, we are beginning to discover the nature of something which is very intimate; it's kind of always with us when we are in our conscious moments: to be aware, to pay attention.

Mindfulness itself is, I think of it as, a heightened awareness. It's possible to be rivetedly involved, absorbed in some conversation with someone, and I might put down my glasses and forget where I put them. Like just now, I looked to my right when just a moment ago I put them down to my left. Putting down the glasses without being attentive enough to the fact of putting them down, attentive enough to let it register in some deeper way. So, this idea of heightened awareness could maybe be expressed in the little saying that when we do mindfulness practice, we stop for awareness. We stop to be aware.

Whatever is happening, whatever is going on in the moment, if we're attentive, we're stopping to be aware to let things register in a fuller way. What we do as we do this meditation now—the mindfulness of breathing, the whole endeavor, the whole adventure of mindfulness practice, the journey of mindfulness in the instructions of the Buddha—it begins with a heightened knowing, a registering of the experience of breathing.

When I was driving down here today, I needed a certain ongoing attentiveness to the road, to the driving, and I couldn't just casually be paying attention to other things. I had to be here with the road. When I came down here to IMC, I looked at these big windows we have to my left that have these wooden frames. Because I was going to give this talk, I asked myself, "What's it like to see something new in these windows?" I've seen them for a long time; I look at them every day. I wasn't so much interested in finding something new, but rather, what kind of attention do I use so that I can discover something new? What is that? A little sharper focus, a little bit more heightened attention. What is that like?

And then sure enough, I saw something new. I said, "Oh, cool. That's pretty cool that the wood grain is positioned so the carpenter put it in that way for the wood grain to flow in like that." That must have been unconsciously done. So as we do something as simple as breathing, it isn't that we are trying to get deeper and deeper into the breathing exactly, but more clear in the attention to breathing—the receptive registering.

Maybe in the process, it is as if you're going to discover something new in the breath and breathing. It isn't so much that discovering something new is important, but rather the kind of attention: hopefully peaceful, relaxedly interested, available without preconceived ideas, without straining to discover or to acquire some new understanding. Just a heightened attention. Breathing is the experience, the medium through which we are beginning to cultivate this heightened attentiveness. One that allows us to become absorbed in the present moment and not distracted by our thoughts.

Guided Meditation

So, to assume a meditation posture. Take a little bit of time to have a posture that allows the chest to be a teeny bit more open. Maybe even for the shoulder blades to be allowed to rest backwards, down the back. And gently closing your eyes.

It's my experience that every time I sit down to meditate, breathing is a little bit different than how it's been before. Or it's going to be unique for these moments. Being aware of your breathing, and aware of the sensitivity to the experience, gently take a few long, slow, deep in-breaths. And as you exhale, what kind of attention is needed that supports you to relax your body as you exhale?

Breathing in, breathing out. And then letting your breathing return to normal.

Breathing in and feeling your body on the inhale. And as you exhale, attentive to the experience of relaxing as you relax different parts of your body. And then settling into your breathing. The rhythm in your breathing can be used to bring attention to awareness itself. Attention to breathing helps us to be aware of awareness.

If there's any strain or tension, as you exhale, relax the strain. It might be helpful to have a sense of receiving the inhale, receiving it into awareness. In what way can attention be calm and peaceful? Perhaps allowing the thinking mind to become quieter and calmer. As if you're going to discover something new in the experience of breathing. Curious, interested. It's not that you have to discover something new; you might feel the attention that's used for that exploration.

How would you enter into awareness, into attention, so all there is—or almost all there is—is breathing and attention to breathing? Attention, awareness of breathing, and breathing. What would that awareness be like? Be content to discover that in short moments. Coming back again and again to discover a new way, a clearer way, of receiving the experience of breathing.

What is the quality of your attention now? And as I bring your attention to awareness, can you take a few moments to sit here with relaxed, open awareness? A receptive awareness, or if it's available, sensitive to a clarity of attention.

And then I'm going to say a few words, concepts. See if as I say the words, maybe with associations you have with them, see how that changes the quality of your attention, of your awareness.

Love.

Hate.

Generosity.

Greed.

Wisdom.

Delusion.

Confidence.

Anxiety.

In a sense, awareness is the medium through which these different states operate, and they can have a big impact on how we're aware, the nature of attention. But to appreciate that awareness is the medium, and to use that medium for the welfare and happiness of oneself and others.

And as we come to the end of the sitting, consider how being aware and attentive is a means, a support for love and goodwill, for generosity and care. And may we stay close to our capacity for attention, so that attention itself is the byway, the highway, the means, the path, the medium for how we care for this world. In being attentive, may we contribute to the happiness of others, the safety of others, the peace of others, and to their freedom. May all beings be happy.

Dharma Talk

So here we are, the second talk focusing on the Buddha's teachings and instructions on mindfulness practice. It was a surprise many years ago when, happily and eagerly, I picked up the text. I'd read it before, but I picked up the text and I really wanted to discover: what did the Buddha actually have to say about mindfulness? What did he actually say about practicing mindfulness? The Pali word is sati^[1].

I went to this text, and as I went through it, I was surprised, actually a little shocked, at how little he actually says about mindfulness. The title of the text is the Four Foundations for Mindfulness (Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta^[2]), and so I thought for sure there would be lots of references to this word sati. And then, surprisingly, there is very little. There's a little bit in the introduction about mindfulness, just a statement about it: "One is mindful, clearly aware, and ardent." So I want you to practice, and here "mindful" is an adjective; it's not a verb in the way it's used.

As I said yesterday morning, there was a section beginning that says, "Going to a forest, the root of a tree, an empty building, sitting cross-legged, body upright, and establishing mindfulness to the forefront." In the rest of the long text that we have, the word mindfulness doesn't appear until maybe the very end, again as a kind of conclusion. All the exercises, all the instructions of what to do, do not have the word mindfulness in them. So that was a little bit of a surprise. I thought, "What does this mean?"

As I started looking through the texts of the Buddha, there is nothing in his teachings that would be comparable to the English expression "be mindful." Like my mother might tell me, "You know, be mindful, Gil," when I was growing up, where "mindful" is used as a verb, an activity that you would do: do mindfulness.

So this sati, whatever sati is that was translated as mindfulness, was not seen as something that we do, but rather something that we establish. As I went through the different teachings of the Buddha, I saw that sati was associated with the verbs to abide in, to establish, to cultivate. If a farmer cultivates a plant, the farmer is not doing the growing; the farmer is creating the conditions so the plant can grow.

If we abide in, or dwell in something—I love the expression abiding, because to me it's just kind of a peaceful way of just being there, feeling at home in some place. It's where you're supposed to be. To abide in sati, in mindfulness, is to rest in it. I once used a photograph or a slide of a big whale floating peacefully in the ocean, an underwater photograph of this big whale, to represent abiding. Abiding in sati and awareness. So this sati is not associated with an activity of doing. It's more like a state of being aware.

So how am I supposed to do it? What's the activity? If you go look at this text that we're going to study over these next weeks, the actual activities, the practices that we do, maybe could be called mindfulness practices in the sense that they are there to cultivate, to establish, to grow mindfulness so we can abide in it. The instructions, the verbs of things that we're doing, the first thing that's talked about is to know. To know that one is breathing; to know one is breathing a long breath, or short when it's a short breath. Later on, there are instructions to clearly recognize what's happening, so it's a higher order of mental activity to recognize something, and I'll talk more about that later.

The text also talks about observing, and then it talks about something that has the word sati in it, but it's a compound called sati-sampajañña^[3], and this is lucid awareness. I like to translate sati as awareness rather than mindfulness, partly because we have this wave of the mindfulness movement going through the modern world, and the meanings and definitions of what mindfulness is these days are very much influenced by how it's taught in that movement. There is nothing wrong with how it's taught, but they use the word mindfulness differently than how the Buddha uses it. For the Buddha, this word sati is a state that we can abide in, establish, cultivate, grow. It's not an activity that we do.

The activity we do is this knowing. We don't want to do a meditation practice that feels like a lot of work and makes us busy, but knowing is this wonderful, special quality. It doesn't have to be so cognitive or thoughtful. If I'm sitting talking with a friend and I'm fully absorbed in the conversation, my attention is there for sure. Then I put my glasses down and continue talking. Then I get up to go to the bathroom and get some tea, come back, and I say, "Where are my glasses?" I have no idea, even though five minutes before I might have put them down. But I put them down without clearly knowing I was putting them down, or clearly being present for the experience of putting them down.

This idea of being present enough to let the experience of what we're doing register enough so that it can stay a little bit in our memory—before the Buddha, the word for sati had associations with memory. It's the kind of receptivity and attention that's required for us to kind of remember something later, like where my glasses are. It isn't like we're memorizing, which is a higher order of mental activity, but there's a kind of pausing. I like the expression, "we stop to know." We pause to know.

We engage knowingly with what we're doing, so we're present for what we're doing. We do one thing at a time, we're really there present for it, and in that presence there's a heightened knowing, recognition, a kind of attentiveness to the experience. As that heightened attention and knowing operates, it then supports the cultivation, the growing of awareness. Awareness follows in the wake of the practice of knowing, and it's meant to be a peaceful practice.

So it begins with just knowing the breathing. It's such a powerful practice, mindfulness of breathing. It's not suitable for everyone, so it's fine to do other things, but it's a wonderful thing to acquire the ability to get focused, centered on the breathing, to learn to gather the mind together. So that with the experience of breathing, we're not scattered and distracted; we're just there with that. It is as if we're present to know it well. Almost as if it is the kind of attention we bring to something we've looked at a long time, we've passed it by, we've been with it, and then we say, "Let me stop and look to discover something new in it that I've never noticed before." Not straining to know or discover, but just to relax, glancing at it, looking at it, roaming around the thing. "Oh, look at that. I never noticed that before."

It requires a kind of knowing that registers something more deeply so we could, in a sense, then remember it. I'm spending a lot of time now with my mother who has advanced dementia, and we can have wonderful exchanges back and forth, very clear in the moment. But her memory lasts probably 30 seconds. I'll say something and she'll come back with a wonderful reply. Ten seconds later I could ask the same question, and she would come back with the same or a different reply; she doesn't remember I said it. For her, nothing sticks. There's a clarity to her, but something about the attentiveness is not all there so that it has a place to register or stay or stick. I don't really understand how dementia works so well, so whether I'm accurate exactly with this is not so important. I'm trying to convey to you the specialness of knowing.

To attend to something so that we know it in a deeper way, but without it being heavily cognitive, investigatory, questioning, or a thought-filled exploration. Just very, very simple. So that as we know the breathing and get more and more centered and present for just the breathing, we know it more clearly. But the mind also gets quieter, more peaceful, and calmer.

The difference between a concentration practice and mindfulness practice is that in concentration practice, we're getting absorbed in the breathing. In mindfulness practice, if we're getting absorbed, we become absorbed in the knowing and the clarity of awareness that takes in the experience. So we're more available in mindfulness to register the details, the fullness, the richness of an experience, and how it changes over time, than we often are if we just do concentration practice, where we're trying to hold the mind still in a certain kind of way. Rather than letting the experience become richer in the knowing mind, sati is awareness.

Tomorrow I'll talk a little bit about how these exercises of knowing, recognition, and observation lead to a heightened awareness. This path, this journey to heightened awareness, is the trajectory of Satipaṭṭhāna, of the foundations for awareness.

In the meantime, maybe you'll explore the nature of your awareness, of your attention, of your knowing, all these faculties of attentiveness that we have. For today especially, notice your faculty of knowing. The simplest knowing, the kind of knowing that if you really let it register something, you would remember where you put your glasses or where you put your keys. Just that simple.

So thank you, and I look forward to tomorrow. Tomorrow when you greet, those of you who are connected to the chat and would like to do the good mornings or the greetings, I would love to see greetings in your native language. Many of you are native English speakers, but for all the different places in the world, wouldn't it be lovely to have a gathering of the globe through the languages? So thank you.