Mindfulness

[Bohdiyana]

Originally Posted by sky123

or mybe .... dish up some good karma would be nice.
I actually found it written on a fridge magnet.

Mundane tasks can be therapeutic if practised mindfully, no past, no future, just now watching the soap bubbles

That's Zen right, when sweeping, just sweep, when doing the dishes, just do the dishes. Ignoring the thoughts can be done in any activity. Like if I do the dishes and the thought comes to me, sheesh I hate this, or wow most of these dishes were caused by others making food, I can just ignore these thoughts.

I'm using the word "ignore" which is probably not the best word but it's hard to find a way to say this stuff that communicates the meaning. The word "ignore" implies I am resisting what is there, that is not really it. What I am dong is to consciously not let my attention place any reality on my thoughts. Maybe "transcending" is a better word than ignore. I don't know. In it is also a self understanding of the unreality of thought, the fakeness of it. It's like an insight comes and you are looking at it all from a different perspective. You somehow are outside of it instead of in it. The thought, like I don't like doing the dishes again, is no longer accepted or experiences as truth. With an insight that questions it's truth or reality, it stops having any effect whatsoever. Insights are non-verbal so me using the word "questions" is maybe bad as well.

So a lot is going on when I am doing the dishes mindfully and it seems impossible to explain exactly what I am doing or exactly what is happening internally, it's like you say, it happens naturally, no effort, I'm just paying more attention maybe, infusing now with a little more awareness, but the effect is an expansion of awareness and freedom from the mental activity in the mind. There are many stories of Zen Masters reaching enlightenment while doing some mundane activity like dish washing.

It kind of makes sense because enlightenment is liberation, liberation is transcendence of ego or thought or mind, so liberation or insight happens in the middle of it, in the middle of ego. One has to become liberated from something, so that something has to be present. Liberation is not pushing something away. it is realizing I was holding it. With the realization or insight, the thing moves away on it's own. It dissipates and loses it's effect on you.

I remember reading online some famous Buddhist teacher's Q and A's and someone told him I really resent having to clean up after everybody in my house, picking up their messes doing their dishes and the Master answered them by saying, you need to do all the work in your house. This is how you will find liberation.

[sky]

Originally Posted by Bohdiyana

That's Zen right, when sweeping, just sweep, when doing the dishes, just do the dishes. Ignoring the thoughts can be done in any activity. Like if I do the dishes and the thought comes to mek, sheesh I hate this, or wow most of these dishes were caused by others making food, I can just ignore these thoughts.

I'm using the word "ignore" which is probably not the best word but it's hard to find a way to say this stuff that communicates the meaning. The word "ignore" implies I am resisting what is there, that is not really it. What I am dong is to consciously not let my attention place any reality on my thoughts. Maybe "transcending" is a better word than ignore. I don't know. In it is also a self understanding of the unreality of thought, the fakeness of it. It's like an insight comes and you are looking at it all from a different perspective. You somehow are outside of it instead of in it. The thought, like I don't like doing the dishes again, is no longer accepted or experiences as truth. With an insight that questions it's truth or reality, it stops having any effect whatsoever. Insights are non-verbal so me using the word "questions" is maybe bad as well.

So a lot is going on when I am doing the dishes mindfully and it seems impossible to explain exactly what I am doing or exactly what is happening internally, it's like you say, it happens naturally, no effort, I'm just paying more attention maybe, infusing now with a little more awareness, but the effect is an expansion of awareness and freedom from the mental activity in the mind. There are many stories of Zen Masters reaching enlightenment while doing some mundane activity like dish washing.

It kind of makes sense because enlightenment is liberation, liberation is transcendence of ego or thought or mind, so liberation or insight happens in the middle of it, in the middle of ego. One has to become liberated from something, so that something has to be present. Liberation is not pushing something away. it is realizing I was holding it. With the realization or insight, the thing moves away on it's own. It dissipates and loses it's effect on you.

I remember reading online some famous Buddhist teacher's Q and A's and someone told him I really resent having to clean up after everybody in my house, picking up their messes doing their dishes and the Master answered them by saying, you need to do all the work in your house. This is how you will find liberation.

I understand what you mean by ignore or transcend thoughts, I think of it as ' thoughts without a thinker '. Most thoughts that pop into my head are not mine anyway so if I didn't think them I will ignore them : why waste energy.

Mindfulness these days is an umbrella concept in which you can project everything you want it to be.

That said as part of the noble eight fold path. Sati is literally translated as memory. Keeping something in mind. In meditation this is a useful skill to catch yourself wandering from your meditation object. Remembering to go back to your meditation object. That is all.

In the satipatana sutta there are four abidings where mindfulness can dwell. Keeping the body in mind. Keeping feelings in mind(in buddhism there are just 3 btw pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant or unpleasant/neutral) Keeping the mind in mind (read the abbidhama for mindstates) and keeping mental qualities in mind.

well that my 0.02 cnts

With Love
Eelco

[Shivani Devi]

Originally Posted by catsquotl

Mindfulness these days is an umbrella concept in which you can project everything you want it to be.

That said as part of the noble eight fold path. Sati is literally translated as memory. Keeping something in mind. In meditation this is a useful skill to catch yourself wandering from your meditation object. Remembering to go back to your meditation object. That is all.

In the satipatana sutta there are four abidings where mindfulness can dwell. Keeping the body in mind. Keeping feelings in mind(in buddhism there are just 3 btw pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant or unpleasant/neutral) Keeping the mind in mind (read the abbidhama for mindstates) and keeping mental qualities in mind.

well that my 0.02 cnts

With Love
Eelco

I never made this connection before now.

I am a Hindu (a devotee of Shiva), who visits the Buddhist section sometimes because of my cultural upbringing in Bali, Indonesia.

Is it just a coincidence, I just finished making a post, in the Christian Forum (of all places) about how God can be vengeful, making the direct reference to Sati - the name of Shiva's first wife who committed suicide due to separation from God and her ongoing mental abuse and emotional turmoil?

http://www.spiritualforums.com/vb/sh...32&postcount=9

Is it just mere coincidence that Sati is 'mindfulness' and the lack of such mindfulness results in a separation from God, requiring the Ego to sacrifice itself?

I wonder...I wonder...

[Bohdiyana]

Originally Posted by sky123

I understand what you mean by ignore or transcend thoughts, I think of it as ' thoughts without a thinker '. Most thoughts that pop into my head are not mine anyway so if I didn't think them I will ignore them : why waste energy.

Yea that's perfect way to understand it. I remember I was reading some science news years ago and they said cognitive scientists recently discovered that thoughts appear in our brains before we are conscious of them. I was like what?! That means "we" as consciousness, can have absolutely nothing to do with what we are thinking. So Buddha may have figured out and realized something about himself that science would discover 5000 years later, that thought is largely a mechanical "computer" process the brain does based on conditioning, habit, memory etc and it has nothing to do with "us."

But then the human body is a machine, the brain a thought producing super computer, and us, as consciousness, is sitting firmly in the middle of all of that. So what we are, as awareness, intelligence, knowledge can affect thought and its effects in a lot of ways. We can influence what the "machine" is doing in a lot of ways. Like when you focus in on thought, it tends to stop. When it is observed fully and questioned, it changes. But then if one is in "normal" unaware states, like where we passively follow thought as self, thought becomes noisy, dominating etc.

Since we can choose to have nothing to do with the thoughts our brains are producing, we can realize or become aware they are not truth and therefore stop them from having an effect on our experience and on what would normally come out of them as far as actions or moods or feelings emotions etc. We can choose to not let our brains thinking or thoughts negatively affect or impact our experience of now. But then, our self aware consciousness can influence thought and use it as a tool of communicating and self knowledge. So, I think thought can work two ways. Either thoughts are presented to an unaware consciousness, and so this consciousness submissively accepts these thoughts as truth and believes them to be from self, so you get reactions, fear, emotions, conflicts and all of that, or due to the state of consciousness as being self aware and awake, thought is either ignored and has no effect or presence at all, or it is used as a tool by consciousness to communicate what is present as far as awake consciousness or self understanding.

If you think about it, it's funny how we accept thoughts as being "ours." Like take something simple like having a favorite color. How do we know a thought like this is true? According to science, somewhere in our lives somebody asked us what our favorite color was and we did not answer, our brains did. Our brain, a supercomputer, made all kinds of random connections using advanced parallel processing where billions of calculations are done a second, examining memory, much of which was produced by the brain/thought itself using similar methods, so for example, one day we were looking in a crayon box to color a dress on a girl in a coloring book and our eyes randomly went to the blue crayon so the brain picked that and then over time, all these random brain produced color events happened in our lives and so when asked what our favorite color was our brain choose an answer, based on random memories, none of which we or "us" produced, as it was all brain produced experience. But we became aware of "our" answer in a split second and blurted out "blue" and now that brain produced thought is a memory so we are conditioned to believe our favorite color is blue.

A few times I was discussing this with friends, about how thought is produced by the brain, and we came up with a game where we would ask each other hard to answer questions to see how long it would take our brains to produce an answer. Questions where the brain would have a hard time finding connections and linked experience in memory and conditioning to produce "our" answer. Like, what is your favorite insect and why? Most people would have never been asked this before so it was kind of funny seeing it can take some brains quite a while to come up with a response. But it can and will no doubt about that.

There's also a game you play where you ask yourself a question that cannot be answered and you see what the brain does, Like there are only two possibilities about the size of the universe. It either goes on forever, is infinite without an end, or it ends somewhere. Which is more likely to be true and why? Both answers blow your mind as humans cannot comprehend either as it is so far out of our experience and knowledge. Questions like these can cause this sense of bafflement or wonder that leads to a change in consciousness, like a free floating expansive feeling as you walk around with a question your brain cannot answer or understand. You experience "not knowing" which is really different as the majority of the time our consciousness is in "I know everything" ego mode. "Not knowing" consciousness can also be triggered by questioning the nature of being and reality. Really if you fully embrace the knowledge that thought is just a trick of the brain and is not us or from us as we really are, and you do this so deep every thought is discarded as false and therefore is uneffectual, your consciousness and experience can change in profound ways.

Originally Posted by catsquotl

Sati is literally translated as memory. Keeping something in mind. In meditation this is a useful skill to catch yourself wandering from your meditation object. Remembering to go back to your meditation object. That is all.

In the satipatana sutta there are four abidings where mindfulness can dwell. Keeping the body in mind. Keeping feelings in mind(in buddhism there are just 3 btw pleasant, unpleasant, and neither pleasant or unpleasant/neutral) Keeping the mind in mind (read the abbidhama for mindstates) and keeping mental qualities in mind.

yea remembering to stay empty and free, remembering what really is

[sky]

Originally Posted by Bohdiyana

Yea that's perfect way to understand it. I remember I was reading some science news years ago and they said cognitive scientists recently discovered that thoughts appear in our brains before we are conscious of them. I was like what?! That means "we" as consciousness, can have absolutely nothing to do with what we are thinking. So Buddha may have figured out and realized something about himself that science would discover 5000 years later, that thought is largely a mechanical "computer" process the brain does based on conditioning, habit, memory etc and it has nothing to do with "us."

But then the human body is a machine, the brain a thought producing super computer, and us, as consciousness, is sitting firmly in the middle of all of that. So what we are, as awareness, intelligence, knowledge can affect thought and its effects in a lot of ways. We can influence what the "machine" is doing in a lot of ways. Like when you focus in on thought, it tends to stop. When it is observed fully and questioned, it changes. But then if one is in "normal" unaware states, like where we passively follow thought as self, thought becomes noisy, dominating etc.

Since we can choose to have nothing to do with the thoughts our brains are producing, we can realize or become aware they are not truth and therefore stop them from having an effect on our experience and on what would normally come out of them as far as actions or moods or feelings emotions etc. We can choose to not let our brains thinking or thoughts negatively affect or impact our experience of now. But then, our self aware consciousness can influence thought and use it as a tool of communicating and self knowledge. So, I think thought can work two ways. Either thoughts are presented to an unaware consciousness, and so this consciousness submissively accepts these thoughts as truth and believes them to be from self, so you get reactions, fear, emotions, conflicts and all of that, or due to the state of consciousness as being self aware and awake, thought is either ignored and has no effect or presence at all, or it is used as a tool by consciousness to communicate what is present as far as awake consciousness or self understanding.

If you think about it, it's funny how we accept thoughts as being "ours." Like take something simple like having a favorite color. How do we know a thought like this is true? According to science, somewhere in our lives somebody asked us what our favorite color was and we did not answer, our brains did. Our brain, a supercomputer, made all kinds of random connections using advanced parallel processing where billions of calculations are done a second, examining memory, much of which was produced by the brain/thought itself using similar methods, so for example, one day we were looking in a crayon box to color a dress on a girl in a coloring book and our eyes randomly went to the blue crayon so the brain picked that and then over time, all these random brain produced color events happened in our lives and so when asked what our favorite color was our brain choose an answer, based on random memories, none of which we or "us" produced, as it was all brain produced experience. But we became aware of "our" answer in a split second and blurted out "blue" and now that brain produced thought is a memory so we are conditioned to believe our favorite color is blue.

A few times I was discussing this with friends, about how thought is produced by the brain, and we came up with a game where we would ask each other hard to answer questions to see how long it would take our brains to produce an answer. Questions where the brain would have a hard time finding connections and linked experience in memory and conditioning to produce "our" answer. Like, what is your favorite insect and why? Most people would have never been asked this before so it was kind of funny seeing it can take some brains quite a while to come up with a response. But it can and will no doubt about that.

There's also a game you play where you ask yourself a question that cannot be answered and you see what the brain does, Like there are only two possibilities about the size of the universe. It either goes on forever, is infinite without an end, or it ends somewhere. Which is more likely to be true and why? Both answers blow your mind as humans cannot comprehend either as it is so far out of our experience and knowledge. Questions like these can cause this sense of bafflement or wonder that leads to a change in consciousness, like a free floating expansive feeling as you walk around with a question your brain cannot answer or understand. You experience "not knowing" which is really different as the majority of the time our consciousness is in "I know everything" ego mode. "Not knowing" consciousness can also be triggered by questioning the nature of being and reality. Really if you fully embrace the knowledge that thought is just a trick of the brain and is not us or from us as we really are, and you do this so deep every thought is discarded as false and therefore is uneffectual, your consciousness and experience can change in profound ways.



yea remembering to stay empty and free, remembering what really is

Sounds like you had fun with your friends trying to work out whats what.

I am lucky in that I realized from an early age that my thoughts are not the real me, I use to wonder where some of the nonsense that popped into my head came from, I use to call them little entities that came uninvited into my head

If your thoughts are without a thinker then there is no ego involved, another thing thats interesting is that Buddha taught that ego used mindfully is beneficial therefore thoughts that pop up univited should be ignored and mindfull thinking does not contain ego... The hard part is to stop the uninvited and welcome the others that are useful.

[Ground]

If you are mindful of mind's emptiness is your mind full of its emptiness or empty of it?

[sky]

Originally Posted by Ground

If you are mindful of mind's emptiness is your mind full of its emptiness or empty of it?

I think you were a writer of koans in a previous life....

[Bohdiyana]

Originally Posted by Ground

If you are mindful of mind's emptiness is your mind full of its emptiness or empty of it?

I'd say full of emptiness (or full of nothing) as empty of emptiness is fullness (or a thing). But then there in no mind if you are nothing or full of emptiness, only the awareness that is transcending mind. When you are mindful of mind's emptiness, mind becomes non-phenomenal to consciousness.