Here's a good description of what Buddhist mindfulness is all about

There's lots of ways to look upon mindfulness. Mostly I view mindfulness as a practice that doesn't require a grounding in Buddhism. However, I enjoy reading about how Buddhist practitioners view mindfulness, or vipassana insight meditation. 

A concluding chapter of Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, a Buddhist monk, contains a description of what mindfulness can lead to that I found clear and mostly convincing, though I have some doubts about whether the supposedly unconditioned state of nibbana/nirvana actually can be achieved.

Enjoy.

As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together, you become aware of the intimate connectedness of all mental, sensory, and affective phenomena. You watch one thought leading to another, you see destruction giving rise to emotional reactions and feelings giving rise to more thoughts.

Actions, thoughts, feelings, desires -- you see all of them intimately linked together in a delicate fabric of cause and effect. You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall, and you see that they never last; you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off; you see yourself fail. It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.

Out of this living laboratory itself comes an inner and unassailable conclusion. You see that your life is marked by disappointment and frustration, and you clearly see the source.

These reactions arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained, and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have. These are no longer theoretical concepts -- you have seen these things for yourself, and you know that they are real. You perceive your own fear, your own basic insecurity in the face of life and death.

It is a profound tension that goes all the way down to the root of thought and makes all of life a struggle. You watch yourself anxiously groping about, fearfully grasping after solid, trustworthy ground. You see yourself endlessly grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn't change.

You see the pain of loss and grief, you watch yourself being forced to adjust to painful developments day after day in your own ordinary existence. You witness the tensions and conflicts inherent in the very process of everyday living, and you see how superficial most of your concerns really are. You watch the progress of pain, sickness, old age, and death. 

You learn to marvel that all these horrible things are not fearful at all. They are simply reality.

...In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place. In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold. You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them; you see them as the very stuff of human thought. 

You search for that thing you call "me," but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further, and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns, and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them.

You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective, and defensive over these pitiful things, and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself -- physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings, and emotions -- it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for "me."

You find nothing.

In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience, all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes that have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. 

The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.

Your whole view of self changes at this point. You begin to look upon yourself as if you were a newspaper photograph. When viewed with the naked eyes, the photograph you see is a definite image. When viewed through a magnifying glass, it all breaks down into an intricate configuration of dots.

Similarly, under the penetrating gaze of mindfulness, the feeling of a self, an "I" or "being" anything, loses its solidity and dissolves. There comes a point in insight meditation where the three characteristics of existence -- impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness -- come rushing home with concept-searing force.

You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no-self. You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping, and resistance. In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed.

The entity of self evaporates. All that is left is an infinity of interrelated nonpersonal phenomena, which are conditioned and ever-changing. Craving is extinguished and a great burden is lifted. There remains only an effortless flow, without a trace of resistance or tension. There remains only peace, and blessed nibbana, the uncreated, is realized.

Comments

[Sant64]

I read somewhere recently that the persistent and inescapable feeling of self is the result of Original Sin. Some Catholic wrote that of course.

Whether or not Adam & Eve are to blame for it, that feeling of self is the shadow that can't be evaded. All the best sadhana, all the hedonistic entertainments, all the knowledge won't make any difference. After it's over, we're still left with that familiar "me" that hasn't changed a bit since we were 3 years old.

Charan Singh and Chand both confessed to being struggling souls.

Maybe Ramana Maharshi really did transcend the self. I mean, really really transcend it. He lived like he had, so who knows. Maybe some of the Zen masters did as well. But I cannot say I have. After all these years, Mr. Self still tags along.

[Spence Tepper]

We are only what our memory regurgitates back several times a second. We are merely the last copy loaded again...

Continuity is just persistence of short term memory.

Does it really help to see the truth?

But who is the one seeing it?

When you can watch this happening for yourself, who is the watcher?

They are filled with bliss...How can that be?

It is.

We are so excited to be nothing. But we are actually far more than that.

[Appreciative Reader]

Enjoyed reading this post. Excellent description of the experience of Vipassana. A portion of it I can vouch for, from personal experience.

Of course, a great deal of the more dramatic bits of it, while it is borne out by the teachings, that much I can vouch for (I mean obvously, guy's a monk, which is to say a pro, he doesn't need my vouching-for at all!); but the latter part of it is kind of aspirational, to put it gently. Two things, specifically:

First: Do people really experience the emptiness of self? The "teachings" say they do, I've read plenty of books saying they do. But I've interacted a great deal with practitioners and teachers of Vipassana, including hard-core practioners, and including monks as well: but I've not actually spoken with anyone who's actually experienced no-self. (And here's the thing: Had they actually experienced it, that means nothing, really. That you might experience constellations within, does not mean there are constellations within; that you might experience out-of-body sensations, does not mean you've been flying around in your astral body; likewise, that you experience no-self, does not mean there's no self! No-self is a thing only because it happens to be borne out by science. That it might be experienced within is no more than an oddity, at least not unless the inerrancy of such experience and realization is first established. Established by science.)

In any case: The game doesn't seem worth the candle, really, putting in all of this effort merely to experience this. It's like spending hours and days and months and years, to "realize" the earth goes around the sun. I mean, what's the point?

-----

The last bit? The complete craving of "tanha", craving, all of that? Now that would be an interesting thing to realize, a very very VERY useful thing, and in fact the whole point of the Buddha's (probably apocryphal) story. Again, in my (fairly wide) personal interactions with practitioners and teachers of Vipassana, I haven't actually met and spoken who've themselves attained to this.

Attaining to this, now this part would, I suppose, well be "a game that's worth the candle", at least to some people that might be most troubled by this, and that seek this. This part of it, I can see how it might well be worth "hours and days and months and years" of practice. Provided of course it's actually and really a thing, that kind of experience.

[Ron E.]

A nice summing up of mindfulness by Bhante Henepola Gunaratna and descriptions of the findings of such an investigation. I would say that depending on the importance or perhaps better to say, the depth of interest in undertaking mindfulness meditation, such findings are inevitable.

It is often said by teachers of meditation that initially one is searching for a goal, a reward. Later, it is realised that there is no goal other than just sitting (meditating). I tend to see meditation as an on-going enquiry even when not sitting. It is often referred to as simply just paying attention, or just watching which enables insight into all the mental phenomenon that Gunaratana talks of here.

As far as I’m concerned, all the ever-arising thoughts, feelings and so on are seen as they appear, act-ed on where necessary but mostly just observed as the ever-arising procession of mental activity – yet without the habitual guilt, worry, fear etc. that is often associated with them.

The enlightening difference I believe, arrives when no trace of a ‘me’, an ‘I’ can be found, that is apart from the entire ‘structure’ that consists of all the informational contents that poses as ‘me’. I don’t believe it is necessary or even possible to function without a sense of ‘me’, simply because such a structure contains all the information to function in the world. It is sufficient to realise that there is no separate ‘me’ who experiences pain and pleasure etc., just a reactionary mental structure – and one that is in a continual state of flux.

And incidentally, there is no ‘me’ that has such a thing as free will acting independently of all the biological and mental processes that comprise the information that presumes a ‘me’. And perhaps, being psychologically free of believing in a separate controlling ‘me’, adds up to nirvana!