Last year I noted that "Mindfulness has become my meditation." That's been true for quite a few years.
For a long time, over three decades, I was a believer in a mystical form of meditation aimed at detaching one's consciousness from materiality and letting it soar into non-physical spiritual regions of reality.
Sounds good. But it was a fantasy. There's zero demonstrable evidence that supernatural domains even exist, with less than zero evidence (assuming that's possible) anyone has gained access to them.
But this world is real.
Sure, there's valid doubts about how accurately the human brain is able to cognize physical existence, since our organs of perception, analysis, and understanding are unavoidably prone to errors.
So we've got to deal with how the world appears to us, since there is no way of knowing what it is like from some sort of abstract outside perspective -- a topic Thomas Nagel discussed in his book "The View From Nowhere." (Which I haven't read, but plan to.)
Mindfulness meditation appeals to me because it seeks to see things as clearly as possible from within our inherent subjectivity. Every morning I listen to guided meditations via the Calm and Waking Up apps on my iPhone. Tamara Levitt does the Calm meditations, and Sam Harris the Waking Up meditations.
Recently I've also been listening to guided meditations that accompany the book "Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World." (They're on the publisher's web site.)
I recall that many years ago a comedian on Saturday Night Live who played a character called Father Guido Sarducci. One of his recurring jokes was the Five Minute University.
Father Guido’s Five-Minute University aimed to teach students in five minutes “what the average college graduate remembers five years after he or she is out of school.”
In that spirit, here's some headlines, so to speak, of what I remember most from the three mindfulness apps/programs mentioned above.
Calm. Tamara Levitt enjoys speaking in this fashion. Breathing in, know that you are breathing in. Breathing out, know that you are breathing out. This may sound trite, but for me it is the core of mindfulness practice. I say something similar frequently to myself.
When my mind wanders in my Tai Chi class, I tell myself, "While doing a Tai Chi form, know that you are doing a Tai Chi form." Ditto while driving my car. Or washing the dishes. Bringing mind and body into sync, attending to the same thing, is a powerful way of staying in touch with reality.
Waking Up. Sam Harris frequently asks the listener if in addition to being aware of the breath, say, there is a center to consciousness apart from that awareness. Meaning, I believe, a self or soul that stands apart from what awareness is conscious of.
Looking for that center doesn't take long. Harris says it should last no longer than a snap of the fingers. Finding no such center, we're led to understand that an enduring unchanging self is an illusion, in line with Buddhist teachings. All there is, is a bunch of stuff happening within our consciousness.
Mindfulness book. I believe Mark Williams, a professor of psychology at the University of Oxford, and co-author of this book, narrates the guided meditations related to the book's eight main chapters.
I liked what he says in the Week Four meditation: Stillness is nourished when we allow things to be just as they are, right now, moment by moment, breath by breath.
This theme is echoed by Levitt and Harris. We aren't trying to change anything through mindfulness meditation. We aren't seeking to gain wisdom, be a better person, or grasp the secrets of the universe. We're simply trying to see things as clearly as possible.
Harris likes to speak about dropping back into the space from which awareness of this and that occurs. This is a powerful idea, because it makes it possible to be mindful of anything, really, including mindfulness itself. It's always possible to take a step back.
That isn't a distancing or denial of what we're experiencing, such as a painful emotion. Rather, I think Harris is correct when he advises that when something is bothering us, we should try to get closer to that feeling, to burn up with that feeling.
He claims that this will allow us to get over the pain in moments, or at most, a few minutes.
Maybe.
I do agree with Harris that trying to change how we feel, as if we were a disobedient dog that needs training, is counter-productive. Better is to simply be acutely aware of how we feel, which rather counter-intuitively, helps the feeling to pass more quickly.
Mindfulness seems so boring, where as this- this is RSSB and ECKANKAR on steriods...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQjAIlFZWWc.
Now that guy knows how to teach. The others are pretenders, caught in the monkey mind , unable to go beyond. So they sit in their self created world of mental gymnastics,jumping jumping jumping from one thought to another.
Posted by: Jim | August 08, 2019 at 02:25 PM
I sometimes listen to dhamma talks during meditation time. Ajahn Amaro is one of my favorites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LZEd3QbXZ8
Posted by: j | August 09, 2019 at 09:01 AM
"I do agree with Harris that trying to change how we feel, as if we were a disobedient dog that needs training, is counter-productive."
And yet that's what we are doing when we tell ourselves to be in the moment...
"Fido! Heel!"
Same thing.
Posted by: Spence Tepper | August 09, 2019 at 01:56 PM
I see mindfulness basically as awareness training, countering the habit we have of over-thinking and perhaps more importantly our habit of automatically reacting to thoughts and situations based on cultural, national, religious (and numerous other sources) conditioning.
Most of our troubles and those of the world at large stem from group and personal agendas. Our heads are stuffed with an enormous amount of information and from this we form an identity, a self. We are rarely aware of the reactionary way in which we act out some of our agendas, often causing ourselves and others much conflict.
Without going into the various causes and outcomes of our unconscious agendas, to be able to really see for a moment where and how our reactions arise is to allow the possibility of letting them go – where appropriate.
Its not about changing how we think and feel but of being aware of those feelings. Psychologists make a lot of money helping us come to terms with our troublesome thoughts and feelings. As humans we have the ability of being aware of our own mentation. But perhaps because we have been so conditioned and manipulated by our human environment (our various belief systems), we now have such huge investments in maintaining the self structures imposed upon us - we are incapable of change.
Posted by: Turan | August 10, 2019 at 01:51 AM