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Mindfulness of Breathing (41) Seeing Openness of Mind

The Meaning of Citta

So, the mindfulness of mind, or, "breathing in, experiencing the mind; breathing out, experiencing the mind."

What exactly citta^[1] is, I'm arguing that we can't really know what the Buddha had in mind. But I wanted to read you part of the definition in the Pali Text Society Dictionary^[2], which is more or less a standard Pali-English dictionary. It was written over a hundred years ago now, but it's still an excellent resource for understanding this.

They have a wonderful little entry for citta, the word that we're mostly translating as mind. It says the meaning of citta is best understood when explaining it by expressions familiar to us, as for example, "with all my heart and soul," "I have no heart to do it," "blessed are the pure in heart," "singleness of heart," all of which emphasize the emotional and connotative side more than the mental and rational side. It may therefore be rendered mood, disposition, state of mind.

Some people prefer to translate this word citta as heart, or as heart-mind. It kind of touches into the emotional side of all this more than the word "mind" might. "Mind" might even feel a little bit removed and not so connected to our emotional life. Also, when some people like me treat mind and awareness almost as synonymous, sometimes as we get into deeper meditation, that also might lend itself to the idea that we're being removed a little bit from the embodied emotional life that we have. Which may be a little unfortunate. Whatever citta is, whatever the mind is, whatever awareness is, maybe it's a rich world that includes our emotionality in important ways.

Opening and Closing the Mind

In steps seven and eight of mindfulness of breathing, it's looking at the mental activities, recognizing the mental activities in the mind, and then relaxing those mental activities. Tranquilizing or calming them is that movement of opening, having the mind become open, not contracted.

As I said earlier, the mind that's preoccupied gets hijacked. Attention gets hijacked by our desires, by our aversions, by our doubts, by our restlessness, and our anxiety. It's almost like those times are like a black hole that attention falls into, and it doesn't really come out. We don't step back and get the bigger picture; we get swept away in our preoccupations, our thoughts, our fantasies, our stories, our resentments—all this inner world of what goes on.

These are all mental activities that hijack awareness. There are other mental activities that enable awareness or open the mind, that don't hijack but rather enhance the quality of the mind. The Buddha made the distinction between mental factors that close the mind and those that open it. This is the distinction between what are called the Five Hindrances^[3] and the Seven Factors of Awakening^[4].

The Five Hindrances are strong sensual desire, lust, or craving; aversion, ill will, or hostility when it's strong; sloth and torpor, lethargy, or resistance; agitation, restlessness, anxiety, regrets, and agitated states of preoccupation; and then confusion, uncertainty, or doubt, where we can really get lost in a rabbit hole of doubt and confusion. These can have very strong gravitational pulls, and we get pulled into them. They can sometimes come with a lot of authority, like, "This is really important; I have to be involved in this." But the consequence is that attention gets hijacked.

For the Buddha, when attention gets hijacked like this, he calls that a loss of wisdom, a blindness, an obstruction to the mind, a covering over of the mind. It makes the mind fragile, brittle, and hard.

Whereas the other factors that open—the Seven Factors of Awakening—those are mindfulness itself, a clarity of mind that's sometimes called investigation, effort, joy, tranquility, samadhi^[5] (concentration), and equanimity. All of those can work together as a whole, and each of those can operate singularly to really open the mind up and open the inner quality of the inner life. This is where the emotional side really comes into play. One of the most sublime, beautiful emotions—that is hard for people who haven't experienced it to appreciate—is the quality of equanimity. It's a beautiful kind of feeling. Tranquility has almost an emotional quality to it; it's really strong, embodied, and broad, and has a warmth and clarity to it, a stillness and peacefulness. Joy, of course, seems emotional. Samadhi is an integration, a bringing together of all aspects of our life, including the emotional.

What these Seven Factors of Awakening are, they are characteristics or supports for awareness itself, for mindfulness itself. The more they operate together with awareness, they tend to open awareness and strengthen awareness. They create vision, they support wisdom, they remove obstructions, they remove the coverings that keep us from seeing things clearly. They make the mind malleable, soft, workable, ready to do the work, receptive to doing the work.

So here we're talking about mental activities that represent this divide between becoming more closed or more open. It's possible to cultivate each of the Seven Factors of Awakening by itself—to be attuned to them, learn to recognize them, and support them. They also tend to grow in the wake of really emphasizing mindfulness and attention here, but being attentive that the mindfulness, in whatever way we practice it, in and of itself is not a closing activity. That there aren't some other factors that come along with mindfulness—like striving, expectation, pushing, or contracting around the mindfulness—that begin moving it in the direction of the hindrances, closing it down.

The Healing Power of Recognizing the Mind State

This ability to track the mind state allows us to protect the mindfulness from being hijacked that way. We can track the mindfulness: "Now it's getting closed more as I try hard, and maybe I can find a way to be more open, more relaxed." This simple movement from being more closed to being more open—yesterday I used the Gil Fronsdal^[6] technical terms, "ouch" and "ah." What involves more stress, more suffering, more discomfort, and what goes in the opposite direction?

To be able to see that simple divide is one of the primary characteristics of the second factor of awakening, usually called investigation, but which is really a clarity of mind that sees this veil, and sees this distinction between the "ouch" and the "ah"—being closed and being open, becoming blind or lost in our preoccupations, and opening up and having vision and clarity about what's happening.

This is one of the great advantages of beginning to tune into the mind state. As I said in the meditation, it's fascinating. I said it's fascinating because it's very valuable and even healing, because just being attentive to that simple movement can free us from having to get caught up in the details of what's happening—whether it's right or wrong, or "am I a good or bad person because of what I'm doing this way?"

You can have the worst thought, the worst preoccupation that has ever happened in the history of humanity, and in this mind state practice, it doesn't really matter that it's the worst thought anybody's ever had. It just matters that you recognize that you closed down, you got tight, and that there's an opportunity then to just allow yourself to open, just let it go, let it kind of recede, and move towards the openness of mind.

That simple movement, that direction to go, can make the practice in some ways much simpler and very forgiving. So, the mind state. That's what we're doing today, and we will continue tomorrow. Starting on Monday, the idea is to go through these Seven Factors of Awakening. Hopefully, as we linger in this area of the mind state, it's such an important one, and then we'll go on from there.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to our time together tomorrow.