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Dharmette: Ordinary and Radical Versions of Mindfulness

Okay. So is mindfulness the practice or the goal? I know, both.

For many years as a mindfulness teacher, I think I never gave a talk on mindfulness until recently. And it wasn't that I didn't want to talk about it, but you kind of can't talk about anything else without talking about sati^[1], mindfulness. So it was sort of woven in a way into every other talk. And I think I was a little hesitant about defining it because any definition might feel too reductionistic or confining, make us feel too knowing, or drain out the majesty of it. So I've been kind of vague in a way about mindfulness.

A friend was telling me about some of her long retreats. In those retreats you go in for practice discussions, interviews, maybe twice a week or so. And she would report on how her practice was going to the teacher, and when she was having a tough time, the teacher's advice was always the same: "Can you be more mindful?"

[Laughter]

Now, on the one hand, if I came in like a mess in a puddle, and the teacher said, "Can you be more mindful?" I would just be like, "I will fight you. I challenge you to a duel right now." But, it's actually amazing advice. The point is that mindfulness is both the practice and the goal. It's what we intend to do and it's also what emerges out of many conditions and is a kind of freedom. Right? To the extent that we are still suffering, you could say mindfulness is compromised. To the extent we're still suffering, there's some crack in the mindfulness.

So, mindfulness can be described in these very mundane ways or almost as a synonym of freedom. In the mundane way, it's holding something in mind to be aware in a steady, clear, alert, equanimous way. The kind of attention is that, you know, sometimes say like the telescope showing the moon, it's not shaking. It's in focus. You're alert, not asleep. You're not fighting with what you're seeing. And we can do some of this at least some of the time.

And it's said that what makes humans human is capacity for high-level, sophisticated reasoning, and I get that, but I kind of think what's distinctive about our species might be mindfulness. Our capacity to recognize phenomena as phenomena rather than the last word on the world. To recognize that perception is not discovered, but constructed. Which is not to say that all phenomena are mind-created, but the mind is always doing something to the world, and what it's doing involves to some extent or another suffering or ease.

And in identification, when we do not appreciate a phenomenon as phenomena, we live in a world defined by the object of attention, by the identification. And when there's knowing, there's always something more than just suffering. That comes to be quite a consolation.

But then there's a more radical vision of mindfulness, which is sort of like an expression of exquisite wholesomeness. Like if we know these dramatic reaches of mindfulness, we would not be suffering. The mindfulness leaves no room for that. It is diametrically opposed to suffering. And in this more radical vision of mindfulness, the instruction is always to look at how partial our mindfulness is. When we develop a kind of faith that to be mindful is to be something in the neighborhood of free, we inspect the partialness of our mindfulness because when we're kind of mindful, that is sort of the enemy of deep mindfulness. Kind of mindful masquerades as mindfulness, but it doesn't actually resolve the knots in our heart.

And that kind of mindful state actually makes us doubt mindfulness. And a lot of the doubt we experience on the path is because we're half-hearted. When the moment is calling, the path is a wholehearted path. So, we come into a practice meeting and interview and we're caught up in some drama of the mind at some level, we are fighting the first noble truth. We're fighting anicca^[2], impermanence.

[Laughter]

The question, "Can you be more mindful? Can you be more mindful?" is so deep. To be truly mindful, in this more radical vision, is to give up hope on samsara^[3], like on this realm that we find ourselves in. And that is very radical and I think that's why there's a lot of confusion in mindfulness-based communities. Like, they don't quite know what they signed up for.

We give up hope for samsara. We also give up fear, which is the flip side of hope. And not in every moment, not forever, but in some moments, we become deeply disenchanted. There will be moments to engage samsara, just not every moment. And as lay people, we have these dueling loyalties to the very legitimate, ethically vital dimension of improving conditions on the one hand, and then relinquishing dependence on anything but awareness on the other. And a lot of our ethical maturation, our spiritual maturation as lay people, is working out this tension.

But in these moments in retreats or even a class, even a short time on Zoom is a kind of invitation towards this more radical gesture, relinquishing notions of my life, my problems. And when a problem is robbed of identification, when it ceases to be a noun, what happens? Problems are nouns. Mindfulness turns everything into verbs. And when in a way there's no foothold in the mind for unpleasantness to become anything, to become anything whatsoever more than unpleasantness. Is it still a problem? Yeah. So, when there's resistance, if there's any resistance, can my being melt into fluidity? I'm angry. Okay, can anger be fully soaked in mindfulness? And what is left when that happens? It's not anger.

The Mula Sutta^[4], the Buddha says that all phenomena have—it's translated in different ways, but all phenomena have liberation as their core and culminate in extinguishment. All phenomena, in other words, are headed towards their end, and to be mindful is to have the mind turned towards the end and cessation. That's mindfulness in its more radical sense.

And of course, there are times when it's impossible to be mindful. Every time you initiate attention, the mind defaults to identification. Just living in a world of things, one of those things being me and my frustration and my inability to melt nouns into verbs. And this happens enough times over a long enough period, maybe on retreat, things get a little desperate. And sometimes we just need to be forgiven. Forgiven that mindfulness eludes us. Forgiveness is kind of the—yeah, forgiving ourself, forgiving samsara. That's the kind of re-entry path for mindfulness.

So, we practice with this mundane way: "Can I be more mindful? Can I be more mindful?" And then maybe we find this more radical dimension that wherever there is fixation and frozenness and identification, [sighs] it's just the warmth of mindfulness being asked forward.

Offer this for your consideration. And yeah, thank you.

So, that's good to practice with you. I'm away for a couple weeks, returning on the 25th. That's always posted on the IMC calendar. But back, yeah, I think it's the day before Thanksgiving. Anyway, I wish you all well. Nice to be with you.