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Mindfulness of Breathing (31) Wondrous Mind

The topic for this week is what in Pali is called citta sankhara^[1] (c-i-t-t-a s-a-n-k-h-a-r-a). It's often translated as mental formations, sometimes mental dispositions, sometimes mental constructs. For this week, I've kind of been using the expression "mental activities." It's those activities of the mind which are planning, creating, imagining, and actively thinking about things. A simple perception of something—seeing a wall across the room here—wouldn't necessarily be called an activity. It is an activity, but it's not one of the formations or constructions that we make.

What's fascinating about this idea of mental formations, mental constructions, or sankharas, is that many things that we take to be inherent or just "the way things are" turn out to be an activity of the mind. To give you one example: boredom. When we're bored, it can feel like the thing that we're doing is boring, or the situation is boring. It is boring, but in fact, it's the mind's activity that creates the feeling, the sense of boredom. It's a kind of subliminal judgment or evaluation. It's a holding oneself apart from experience. It can be a resistance. It can be a loss of intimacy with experience. So there are all these things going on in the mind that construct and activate this feeling and idea of boredom.

The idea that we're constructing it—that we're forming it and making it in the mind—gives us a very different orientation to boredom than if the situation is to blame. If the situation is to blame, we better just get away or change it. But if we're responsible because it's an activity of the mind, then we can practice with it. That's one of the things we learn through meditation: how to practice with these mental formations and activities so that we're not caught in them and not pulled around by the nose by them. We learn how to settle them, become more expansive with them, or become freer of them—even when they're there.

With boredom, one would turn the attention 180 degrees from the situation that's boring (whatever it might be, internal or external) and have the attention really look at the boredom itself. Look it right in the eye and say, "Boredom, I see you," and feel it, be with it, and experience it. Learning how to dissipate the boredom because we really see it clearly is very empowering, because it shows us that we don't have to be the victim of our own mental activities.

That's one of the great pieces of good news of this Buddhist teaching: so much of our suffering has a relationship to the activity of our mind. While we can't always change the situation in the world, we can give some care and attention to shifting how the mind is constructing these ideas and concepts, and even constructing the ideas of self that we have. It's phenomenally good news if we have the mindfulness and attentional stability to really see how this works.

By seeing mental activities that way and learning to tranquilize them, calm them, and relax them, this tranquil mind is considered in the Buddhist tradition to be a beautiful quality. Tranquilizing the mind is not becoming numb at all. It's not becoming "less than." It actually begins tapping into something that's really wondrous and amazing about what's available inside that can arise with this idea of a mind that's very tranquil, clean, transparent, smooth, and easy.

This points to one of the problems in the English language with translating the word sankhara as "formations" or even "activities," because some of those are just uninspired. "Mental formations"—what is that? It's kind of an uninspired translation. "Mental activities" maybe means a little bit more, but I don't think it has too much inspiration value in it.

I believe that in the ancient Indian context, the word sankhara had very positive associations. One of the early Indian associations was that it's a word used in the pre-Buddhist Brahmanical traditions to describe sacred rituals. In fact, sankhara sometimes means "to make something sacred." At least, that's what the dictionary definition sometimes has. This idea of something sacred—a ritual which is maybe heartwarming and offers a deep connection for some people—has a very different feeling than just "mental activities."

This inner mental activity of the mind is the quality of the mind that makes things, prepares things, and constructs our sense of self, the universe, ideas, and all that. But as that gets quieter, that movement of mental activity can have a quality of sacredness, reverence, and wonder. But my favorite word is "beauty," which is a translation of a word in Pali: kalyāṇa^[2], which is often translated as "good."

One of the places where it's translated as "good" is in discussions about karma. Karma means action, and the primary action that we're dealing with in meditation is mental action, or mental karma. Sometimes it's translated that there are two kinds of karma: good karma and bad karma. But the word for "good" is kalyāṇa, whose primary meaning is "beautiful." You get a very different feeling about actions if you refer to them as being either beautiful or not beautiful.

This idea that the mental activity can become beautiful as it is, is much more inspiring than simply calming the mental formations or experiencing the mental formations. The seventh step of Anapanasati^[3]—breathing in, experiencing the mental formations (mental activity); breathing out, experiencing mental activity—happens after experiencing some modicum of joy, well-being, and happiness in meditation.

It's important to remember that all these steps of meditation are situational and contextual. We're not supposed to be in a hurry to get past them. If you hear instructions and you're not there yet, just take them in and file them away for the future. There's no need to feel bad that you're not there. We're all going to cycle through these sixteen steps and be at different stages on different days, different minutes, and different weeks, because of what's happening in our lives and all kinds of situations.

It's kind of good to think that we're always beginning at step one, and not be in a hurry or feel like you always have to follow these steps that I'm going through. I'm going through it linearly, but the trap of that is assuming that you're supposed to be right there coming along. I'm trying my best to make it come alive for you, but I've got to trust where you are. Trusting where you are is part of the beauty that we're developing in this practice—that trust, appreciation, reverence, care, and love for oneself. That I can just be where I am and practice there, and trust that this process will unfold. This Anapanasati process is a natural process that, in its own way, will unfold for you. There's no need to be in a rush or hurry through it. This trust is part of the beauty of the mind.

Rather than seeing mental activity and mental formations as neutral, uninspired "stuff in the mind," we're touching into a capacity of the mind to be beautiful, to be wondrous, to be something that maybe borders on or feels sacred. This is the great value of this practice: to really discover a rich, wondrous, beautiful inner life that can really inform how we live in the world. I'd like to think that as we discover this wondrous inner life, we get turned inside out, and what was inside is no longer inside, but something that we share with the world around us.

So as we continue next week, maybe you'll keep this in mind: we're working with a capacity we have for inner beauty and something wondrous that lives in us for sure. Even though some of your mental activities that you're living by, that you're caught in the grip of—and you don't even know you're in the grip of—might be standing in the way for now of seeing how wondrous it is on the inside for you, the beauty that you have.

Thank you for today, and I look forward to continuing next week.