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Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness (2 of 6)

The seventh factor on the Eightfold Path is Right Mindfulness. And now we're coming to the heart of the mental cultivation as part of the Eightfold Path. Whereas the previous factor of the Eightfold Path is Right Effort, developing mindfulness is one of the preeminent right efforts. Right mindfulness is considered to be a wholesome and skillful state of mind to develop. It's healing and helpful. It's greatly beneficial, and it creates a very good foundation for all the things we do in our life. It's a foundation for wisdom, for compassion, for care. But as a foundation, it's good to put the foundation in strong and well first, and really have that as a foundation to have evaluation, wisdom about the world, to have compassion and love for the world. Without a strong foundation, it's a little bit dangerous. It might be that actually the wisdom and the love is not quite wise or loving. It's easy to be fooled or to be a little bit off, or it might be that the wisdom and love is unstable, easily succumbing to something different.

So we cultivate mindfulness, and it's helpful to really cultivate it for its own sake first, to keep the simplicity of it. And part of the reason for that also is that on the path to liberation—the spiritual liberation that Buddhism is talking about—mindfulness is the preeminent mental state, the mental practice that leads to liberation. At all the stages along the way, mindfulness is important right up to the brink of awakening. And so, to really learn the art of mindfulness is so helpful. That art of mindfulness is an art of being very simple with experience, not evaluating or making it complicated, just being with the present moment experience. It is as if there's no past, no yesterday, as if there's no tomorrow, no future. Of course there is, and of course wisdom will operate to help us understand what to do in relationship to the past and the future. But the simplicity of mindfulness is to get established here without the mental activity required for thinking about the past and the future. It's really a delight to let go of so much, to really take in this moment: the beauty of this moment, the fullness of this moment, the depth of this moment, and the miracle of mindfulness, the miracle of being conscious. And it's one of the great miracles, one of the great wonders of the world, to be conscious, to be aware.

And it's often probably one of the most overlooked wonders of the world. People can spend all day busy with their lives without ever really being cognizant of how special it is, how wondrous it is to be conscious. In fact, if you point it out to someone busy with the affairs of daily life, they might even think you're crazy. If I go downtown and come up to a stranger who's busy going about their day and say, "Wow, you might want to take a moment and be aware that you're conscious, that consciousness is here and that you're aware," I don't think it would be well received. I think that they have important things to do. But to really find this foundation and value it opens up wide possibilities, and one of the greatest ones is freedom itself.

So what is mindfulness? There's a difference between how mindfulness is taught in the teachings of the Buddha and how it's often taught in the modern world, especially in the modern world where there's a secular mindfulness that's being taught. They're all good; it's all helpful. But there are distinctions to be made, and I think it's helpful to understand what the Buddha was teaching.

First, the Buddha never told anyone or gave instructions about doing mindfulness. My mother, growing up, might have told me, "Gil, be more mindful," because maybe I was tracking mud into the house. "You should be more mindful of what you're doing there." And so that's an activity, to be mindful. What she was saying is, "Be more attentive." The Buddha never said to anyone to do mindfulness. What he said—the verb related to the word sati^[1], the primary one—is to "establish." And the second one is to "dwell in," to "abide in." One establishes and abides in mindfulness. To establish something is not necessarily doing it; you're bringing it in and rooting it here, letting it be here. And a lot of that has to do with letting go. To establish being aware, a lot of it is just letting go of preoccupations so awareness can really be there, be here.

So the Buddha never said, "Do mindfulness," but he did say to establish it and then to abide in it. I love the expression "abide." The word viharati^[2] can also mean to live in or to dwell in. And to live in something implies you're kind of in a state, and so, in a state of awareness.

Now, mindfulness practice is different than mindfulness itself. The distinction I make here is that one person could be running and you ask, "What are you doing?" and they say, "I'm just running." Another person is running and you ask, "What are you doing?" and they say, "I'm training. I'm training to run for a race." The first person, you don't know if they're running away from the police, if they're just running for the fun of it, running for exercise, or what they're doing—they're just running. The second person, you have a sense that running as a training is more than just running. It involves endurance running, speed, alternating how fast you run, how far you run, the way you run. All kinds of things go into the training to run. It's much more complicated than just running.

So mindfulness training, the mindfulness practice, involves other elements besides being mindful, resting in awareness. In fact, those other qualities are what give the mindfulness strength, develop it, and make it stronger so it's more present. And so in the Buddha's instructions on mindfulness, he doesn't tell anyone to practice mindfulness, to do mindfulness as an activity that you do. You establish it, and then it gives a series of different verbs for what you actually do. These can be seen as ways of being mindful, of practicing mindfulness.

One of the first things he says to do is to cognize, to know, to recognize what's happening. That's a cognitive capacity of the mind to know what's happening as it's happening. That's often represented in mindfulness practice by doing simple mental noting: itch, hearing, breathing, thought. Just recognizing what's there.

Another practice or activity for cultivating or establishing mindfulness is to experience, to feel. Whereas the first one, to recognize, is a mental thing, to feel is more of a physical thing, to feel with your body. With breathing, you can recognize, "That's an in-breath, that's an expansion of the chest as I breathe." But one also can feel that expansion. We can feel the stretching, the movement of it, and those sensations of the breathing occur in the torso if that's where you're focusing. And so it's a sensing, and part of mindfulness practice is to sense experience.

The balance between how much we are cognitively noting—"that's in, that's out, that's an in-breath, that's pressure, that's a release of pressure"—and how much we're letting the mind be quiet, just sensing the experience, is different for different people. It's also different for different stages of concentration as we're practicing, as the mind gets stiller and stiller. We use whatever is helpful, whatever helps the mind become more mindful, more still, more open, more inclusive.

Another activity of mindfulness practice is to observe, to watch the experience. Around many different religions, they emphasize the value of a watcher, of seeing. When you watch something, when you observe something with the mind's eye or with your physical eye, you're not really interfering or changing or acting on what you're observing; you're just seeing it. So when we observe breathing, observe thinking, we're not acting on it or changing it. It is nothing more than just seeing it, observing it.

In the Buddha's teaching, the capacity to observe non-reactively, in a relaxed and open way, and see clearly is understood to be a fairly deep practice that comes when the concentration is strong. Or, to say it differently, it comes when the curtains have been pulled, when the agitation of the hindrances^[3] have fallen away, and we can just simply step back and watch.

Some experiences are more useful to watch, to observe. Sometimes with thinking, we can have all three of these. We can clearly recognize, "I'm thinking." And that clear recognition can be a little movement of freedom from the thinking, and in that freedom, we come a little bit more into a place of being aware. We can also feel the experience of thinking. Unless thinking is very, very subtle, if you're sensitive enough, you can feel the physicality that comes into play when we're thinking. Sometimes there are micro-muscles that tense up, micro-muscles that come into play when we're thinking. Emotions can come into play. So we can see, we can feel, and we can cognize.

We have all these three different realms of things, which are sometimes called mindfulness practice. Some people emphasize more the cognitive, some people emphasize more the sensate, the sensory feeling, and some people emphasize more the observing. What's appropriate for any given individual varies from day to day, from time to time. Learning how to navigate these different ways of being mindful, how to be present, is guided by the principle of: Can I just be here with this experience without reactivity^[4], without being for or against?

As we practice these different things—observing, feeling, and cognizing, knowing—then mindfulness gets stronger and stronger. And as it gets stronger, the sense of being conscious, being aware, becomes stronger. Then we can rest in that, we can abide in it, until it's kind of lucid. This ability just to abide and rest in awareness without the ego and self-identity issues coming into play, without reactivity, without our desires operating, without aversions operating, is a profound state of peace. It allows more and more for the cobwebs of the mind to unravel. It allows more and more for the ways in which we're contracted, or tight, or entangled, caught in experience, to begin to unravel as well. More and more, there's freedom to be found. That freedom in awareness—awareness which is freedom—is really one of the best things, and it's a great foundation for wisdom and for love.

So that's a background for how the Buddha then goes on to teach what Right Mindfulness is: the Four Foundations of Mindfulness^[5]. I will touch on these next week. In the meantime, you might, over this weekend, consider the useful, beneficial ways that you might have experienced these three different aspects of mindfulness practice: knowing (clear recognition), sensing (really feeling through the body what your experience is), and observing. Have fun with them, enjoy the different ways of practicing mindfulness. Thank you very much.