It’s a lovely word, “mindful.” And it’s used a lot these days. From the Buddhist point of view, there are states of mind that are neurotic and unhappy (attachment, anger), some that are positive and productive (love, generosity), and then there’s a third lot, which I like to call the mechanical parts of the mind. They’re the bits that enable us to function, to do what we need to do – whether we’re a murderer or a meditator.
The states of mind in this third category are usually referred to as “neutral” insofar as they’re neither virtuous nor nonvirtuous. But that throws us; we don’t use that categorization in modern views of the mind. But it’s fundamental to Buddha’s. The neurotic ones are necessarily I-based and cause us to suffer and to make a mess of things and the positive ones help us to become self-confident and content and enable us to be useful and connected to others.
One of the mechanical bits is called mindfulness or, as Lama Yeshe and some others refer to it, memory.
There are so many varieties of “mindfulness” out there. So, what’s the Buddhist take on it? Actually, I think there are different interpretations within the Buddhist traditions too.
This mechanical bit of the mind plays a crucial role in our efforts to accomplish concentration, samadhi, which we need to use in the other mode of meditation, called insight, in order to get in touch with reality and cut the causes of suffering.
Mindfulness is not a feeling, it’s not an emotion, it’s not some sort of pleasant state, and it’s not the state of being aware. It’s an active thing. It does a job.
So there we are trying to focus our attention on the breath – a good starting point as an object of concentration – and attention wanders off (and of course it will!), the job of this bit called mindfulness is to be watching like a hawk and the moment attention wanders off, mindfulness brings it back to the breath.
When you sit down to watch the breath, the goal is not to make the thoughts go away – you’ll go nuts if you think that! The goal isn’t to have a nice experience. And the goal isn’t to relax – you’ll end up spacing out or even going to sleep if you think that.
We need to stay sharp. The goal is to keep the attention on the breath and then have mindfulness bring it back when it wanders off. That’s the training.
The thoughts are all there, doing their usual crazy thing. Anchoring your attention to the breath, you train yourself to stay on the breath, which means you allow the thoughts to come and go. You don’t grab hold of them, you don’t wish they’d go away. And you don’t engage in them. And that’s tough — even when we do seem to be paying reasonable attention to the breath, we feel we’re in the very center of all the stories, the dramas.
And why is it so difficult to keep our attention on the breath? The main problem, of course, is attachment running rampant: this neurotic part of our mind frantically going here and there, never satisfied. It needs effort to bring the attention back to the breath. It’s training, it’s hard work.
There’s another part playing a role, too, called vigilance or alertness (some scholars call it introspection), which His Holiness the Dalai Lama refers to as the policeman: it’s sitting there watching mindfulness and attention, as well as all the other bits, making sure each piece is doing its job – and there are many bits of mind involved in this job of cultivating concentration.
Attention, mindfulness, alertness, concentration are all mechanical bits of the mind, in their nature neither virtuous nor nonvirtuous but utterly necessary for us to function well.
And obviously they all need to function in everyday life as well. When we’re distracted while driving the car, it’s mindfulness that brings our attention back to the job at hand. It functions to help us do bad things as well as good – as Lama Zopa points out, “Thieves need mindfulness.”
At some point in our meditation – we’re talking advanced levels here – mindfulness has been perfected, alertness too, and eventually concentration takes over and becomes stable. In other words, mindfulness is a tool, a means to an end, a stepping stone to bigger things.
Concentration is the long-term goal – and it’s mind-blowing when we understand what that would be like. It’s a state of mind way beyond the usual gross conceptual and sensory levels of consciousness that we’re familiar with, which are the only ones posited as existing by the modern views, pretty much.
Lama Yeshe talks a bit in his Mahamudra about what our minds would be like having cultivated even some levels of actual concentration. “As your concentration gets stronger and you reach ever-subtler levels, your mind becomes super powerful. From his own experience, Lama Je Tsongkhapa says that you can reach a point of such clarity in your meditation that your mind feels almost infinite. Your mind is so clear, so sharp, it’s as if you can distinguish all the subtle physical energies. You’ll have the courageous thought, ‘I can count all the atoms of the universe!’ This level of mind is more powerful than even scientific instruments.”
Sounds delicious, right? But unless we give up sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll and go to the mountains, most of us won’t achieve this level of concentration.
Just because most of us won’t achieve this doesn’t mean there is no benefit. There are huge benefits from practicing concentration.
So how to determine success in our daily practice? You are successful if you make effort to bring your attention back to the breath. Even if your thoughts are crazy but you consciously bring your attention back to the breath twenty times a minute, that’s success. Spacing out is not success, feeling good is not necessarily success, relaxing is not necessarily success. Remember, it’s training, it’s a process.
Pabongka Rinpoche says in his instructions on how to cultivate concentration that one of the signs of success at the first of the nine stages of developing concentration is that you think your mind is getting worse. No, he says; you’re just noticing them now, that’s all.
And then there are the benefits once you’ve opened your eyes. You bring this skill you’ve cultivated on your cushion into the kitchen, onto the freeway. Whereas once you’d know you’re angry only when the words vomit out of the mouth, now you notice the angry stories beforehand.
During your meditation you pay attention to the breath and inevitably hear the thoughts more and more clearly. But you leave them there. In daily life you use this same skill, but here you pay attention to the thoughts themselves. That’s what we need to cultivate.
Now we can use our wise, appropriate, useful thoughts to argue with the unhappy ones – before they’re at the level of the body feeling them, before they become emotional, which is usually only when we notice them, which is too late.
As Lama Yeshe says, we need to learn to be our own therapist. So unless we can learn to pay attention to all the stories in our head, how can we distinguish between “what is to be practiced and what is to be abandoned” as the teachings say? This is the very essence of being a Buddhist. This is the day-to-day cultivation of insight.
So be glad to see your crazy thoughts in meditation – but you leave them there. Be glad to hear your crazy thoughts in the car, with the kids, while you’re walking – but now you pay attention to them. This is the difference.
Be conscious. Notice. Hear what the thoughts are saying. And don’t be afraid of them. Greet them! And then you can counteract them, argue with them, bring your common sense into play. That’s being our own therapist. It’s a proactive, intelligent, confident engagement in your own mind.
This is how to mold our mind, as Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, into the shape of a wise, self-confident, compassionate human being.