Don't do that

[Gem]

Whatever you are doing, stop doing that, and just observe.

That is the essence of mindfulness, aka insight, aka vipassana meditation.

I call it 'mindfulness', but these three are common names for the same thing.

The purposes are described in Buddhist philosophy (Satipatthana sutta):

This is the one and only way for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the extinguishing of suffering and grief, for walking on the path of truth, for the realisation of nibbana.

The meditation has 4 objects of observation:

1) body
2) sensations
3) mind
4) mental contents,

and the explanation of meditation was given thus:

A monk dwells ardent with awareness and constant thorough understanding of impermanence observing (insert object of observation here) having removed craving and aversion toward the world.

That passage explains what meditations is, and it has these keys:

1) Ardent awareness: to be alert to, and look closely at
2) Understand impermanence: this will pass
3) Remove craving and aversion: see it 'as it is' without reacting to it

Of course, each of these points are nuanced and warrant deeper discussion, so please forgive my surface interpretations.

Having clarified the purpose, and instructed the approach, the sutta goes on to prescribe breath meditation. It's a lot to quote, so I'm going to summarise.

It's said to find a quiet place where you can be alone and undisturbed, sit with an upright posture, and observe the breath 'in front of him'. With ardent awareness he breathes in, and with awareness he breaths out. If the breath is deep he knows it is a deep breath. If the breath is shallow he knows it is shallow. He trains himself, breathing in he feels the whole body, breathing out he feels the whole body, and having calmed the whole body, he breathes in, and breathes out.

After that instruction there is a parable about a wood turner, which illustrates in a more abstract sense the nature of the observation. One observes their breath in the same manner as a wood turner watches his chisel as he carves. I think this is the most interesting part of the text because it allows one to 'get the feel' of 'what it's like' to observe with refined skill and concentration and gives a bit of meaning to 'ardent awareness'. There is also another parable about a sack of seeds later in the text, which is also an interesting illustration, but this is a long post already and enough is enough.

I hope to continue the topic, and will stay closer to the sutta in this thread than I usually would.

[Unseeking Seeker]

Thanks for sharing, Gem ~ I’m aware of the overview as summarised ~ Thich Nhat Hanh has written something similar. The rabbit hole of desire and aversion goes in deep though, since ardent awareness, as you so eloquently put it, borrows from and operates within the boundaries of mind-body including our samskaras (tendencies). As such, our non-reaction or nonchalance carries a residue, so to speak.

Observing breath too has nuances. Is the breath inert or alive? Is it merely imbibing oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide? What is the force, the power that breathes us even as we are asleep? Such questions in our subconscious mind superimpose cultural beliefs and conditioning.

Ideally, thoughts should cease (in my opinion) but do they? Perhaps relinquishing ownership of thought forms that appear has greater relevance, which of course you have covered in the mindfulness exercise (mind and mental contents) - the standard way being to witness them arising and subsiding in the mind-body vehicle. Then body itself, do we negate it or accept? And gender … all of this forms the canvas upon which we wish to paint. If the canvas is contorted, the image is distorted.

I’m not into scriptural study so I’ll skip that part, relying instead on direct experience on an as is where is basis, moment to moment, in case you wish to share. That said, I like your opening post.

[Redchic12]

Thank you so much for that post Gem.

You explained it simply and easy to understand and it wasn’t too long. (I tend to lose concentration and understanding when posts are complicated and lengthy)

I found it really interesting and insightful.

[Miss Hepburn]

Hi gem - I think of you and me as 2 similar people - good intentions, but coming from way different angles....like, as if we
want the same for our beloved country, but are in 2 diff political parties.

This is a Buddhist way of describing meditation and one reason I am not Buddhist.
It is so different than a more Hindu view of meditation.
I know, I know - I say this often.
I do because, for readers here - there are other approaches to meditation.

And I won't be derailing your thread to differ from your approach! :)

I respect anyone that promotes meditation of any kind, just sayin'.

[Gem]

I don't know anything about Hindu methods of meditation, so I don't have anything to say about it, but mindfulness only concerns reality as it is in the way it experienced by you, which is always universal and never sectarian.

All the questions about breath being inert or alive and what mysterious force is making the breath are irrelevant to mindfulness, which is not a mystical query. This is knowledge: 'I know it feels like this'. It is the actual truth of your experience in the way it is being experienced by you. If mystical allusions arise, which they will, you can discern clearly, this is a mystical allusion, and not the actuality of my experience as it is.

People already know how to pay attention and be aware of 'this' experience, just as it is now. If during your meditation an activity aims to produce an experience 'other than this', or thought tries to capture experience, that's obviously a craving and a clinging motive. Then you recognise: this is craving, soon it will pass.

This is factual, so anyone who investigates it will see how it is true for themselves and realise the way in which meditation is not doing that thing, but ceasing to do it, and ever returning only being aware of real-experience along with the understanding that 'this has arisen and it will soon pass away'.

In the Buddhist text (some translations) 'only being aware' is referred to as 'mere awareness' - and this brings me to the next part of the sutta (Satipatthana):

After the parable of the wood turner, the text goes on to describe the way in which body is observed:

"Thus he dwells observing the phenomena arising in the body, thus he dwells observing phenomena passing away in the body. He observes phenomena arising and passing away in the body and his awareness is established: this is body. He develops his awareness to such an extent that there is mere understanding and mere awareness. In this way he dwells detached, without clinging to anything in the world. This how one dwells observing the body in body".

Keeping in mind at this point that the breath meditation is the awareness of breath, and this passage on how to observe the body applies both to the arising and passing of the sensations caused by the breath, and the arising and passing of sensations throughout the body. It's best to practice breath meditation for a couple of months to harness some attention span and 'ardent awareness' skills first, before starting to examine the whole body, but the description of mere awareness and mere understanding of phenomena arising and passing away is the same in either case.

[Miss Hepburn]

''..what mysterious force is making the breath are irrelevant to mindfulness...''

That is a very good statement to understand mindfuless. Thank you.

The power or force or energy or source that is making our hair grow as we sleep and making the breath, can be felt,
is actually not a mysterious force and would be more of the focus in the Hindu traditions of meditation.

Notice I stayed away from saying God or Brahman or Krishna!
'The power', I thought was generic enough not to ruffle any feathers of those reading here.
I wouldn't have brought this up if in Buddhism...under Meditation I thought it was ok to give another perspective re meditation.

I think I've said enough. Don't wanna step in too much.
Offering choices to new meditators, I suppose would be my motive.

[kris]

Thanks for this thread, Gem.

[Gem]

As I said earlier, it is best to meditate with breath for a couple of months before going through the whole body because one needs to develop bit of attention span and acute awareness to effectively examine the body.

The sutta, however, is a few pages long, so although the thread goes from zero to a hundred in a few days, in practice it takes time. It takes time to cultivate the skills of attention, acute perception and stable equanimity, and even with that fairly well established, purification is timely, and proceeds at its own rate.

Mindfulness is a healing strategy "For the purification of beings". It's designed to penetrate deep and take out the impurities. If it were physical it would be like a surgeon doing a deep operation to take out a cyst. Only difference is you are the surgeon and the patient - and pure awareness is your scalpel.

Pure awareness is neutral awareness. On this exploration we encounter terrible things and are also exposed to tremendous temptations, so aversions and desires are always misdirecting us, but neutralising aversions toward the former and craving for the latter will effectively stop habitual tendencies to resist and avoid the unpleasant whilst chasing and clinging to pleasure, and enable one to settle into quiet equanimity that remains unmoved as all things pass.

Hence Buddha's definition:

A monk dwells ardent with awareness and constant thorough understanding of impermanence observing (insert object of observation here) having removed craving and aversion toward the world.

And in regard to all things:

He develops his awareness to such an extent that there is mere understanding and mere awareness. In this way he dwells detached, without clinging to anything in the world.

Now, picking up from where I left off, the sutta explains awareness of the body in a number of different ways:

1) Postures
2) Impermanence
3) Repulsiveness
4) Material elements
5) Dead body
6) Sensations

As noted in the first post, there are only 4 meditation objects: body, sensations, mind, mental contents. Now we are provided a list of 6 aspects of body awareness alone, we need to discern between what we are actually aware of and what we can only contemplate for intellectual knowledge. For example, we can only know sensation in the most immediate experiential sense, and we can only know this body will die and decay as abstract intellectual knowledge. It is important to discern because the object of meditation is immediate and experiential, whereas the object of contemplation is abstract and intellectual. There is also third category, insight, which is not experienced directly or learned and concluded intellectually as such, but comes as a revelation of wisdom that has a transformative effect on a person. A simple example would be we have an insight of impermanence though the experience of change, and this revelation could also extend to a momentary insight that displaces duration itself... just an example. Insights could be any number of things.

So... as I continue with the stated aspects of body awareness, one needs to discern the way in which it is a meditation of awareness on the experiential level against the way it is an intellectual contemplation on the philosophical level.

I'm trying to keep posts short, so I'll make separate posts about the listed 6 aspects of body awareness.

[Gem]

After the section on breathing, the sutta continues to discuss the ways in which one can be aware of the body, which I listed in the previous post. The first of these is posture, or postures.

Postures

In the sutta there are examples of postures including, walking, standing, sitting and laying down, and it recommends that we should be aware of the respective postures we are in. If walking be aware that you are walking, and so on. Of course, the sutta doesn't list every possible posture, and there are any number of other postures, reaching up, bending over, pushing, climbing, carrying etc. etc. etc. and the suggestion can be simplified by saying, whatever position you are in, and whatever activity you do, be consciously aware of it. "Understand properly" whatever position and activity the body is engaged in.

This does not preclude what was mentioned in previous section on breathing which expanded into the awareness of the whole body, and noticing the nature of phenomena arising and passing away.

At this early stage it isn't possible to do 'everything at once', but the philosophical discussion is only the theoretical background of meditation that guides practice, and is not, like, exact instructions.

If new to practice, which almost everyone is, and even when quite well established in mindfulness, it's hard to be aware of your bodily dynamics all the time, but you can make some time to practice breath awareness in the mindful way daily, and start to notice how you are unconscious of your body most of the time in day to day life. Then, when you realise that you weren't aware of what you were doing, it's simple true, "I was lost in mind and unaware of my real-lived experience". With this we can start to realise just how distracted we actually are, which is, generally speaking, a lot more distracted than you'd think.

From the practical standpoint, At this stage of the discourse it's just being consistent with breath meditation, which will reveal the attention span and the length of time you are distracted for, along with noticing how this rather erratic awareness is also true of all the other aspects of your life. In this way, your practice incorporates everything the teaching has mentioned so far... but the reality of the practice is far more subtle and nuanced that what is said about it.

Keep in mind the underlying fundamentals of mindfulness which are repeated over and over again in every stanza of the discourse:

A monk dwells ardent with awareness and constant thorough understanding of impermanence... having removed craving and aversion toward the world.

He develops his awareness to such an extent that there is mere understanding and mere awareness. In this way he dwells detached, without clinging to anything in the world.

[Maisy]

Observing can be a doing as well. Not doing can be a doing. It's a tricky thing! That is "done." A doing that erases the doer.