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Mindfulness conundrum
zenguitar
Bad BuddhistNew England Veteran
A good Buddhist should perform every action with complete mindfulness. That means she can either a) walk or b) chew gum, but she should not walk and chew gum at the same time, because then her attention will be divided between the two actions.
Right?
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Comments
Hi zenguitar,
I'm no expert, but I don't think they meant it quite like that ... no.
Whatever you do, be present, be there, be mindful...
No. zenguitar.
Both walking and chewing gum each constitutes a multiplicity of actions.
Mindfulness describes the observation of all arising, living and fading phenomena whether chewing, walking, doing both, or doing neither.
Mindlessness describes an obliviousness of any arising, living and fading phenomena whether chewing, walking, doing both, or doing neither.
Complete is one of those perfection adjectives that is more theoretical than experiential in my world.
Does anyone really advocate a person being "mindful" 24/7?
It's advocated in the suttas, see for example the final section "E" in the Satipatthana Sutta: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.010.than.html
For most of continuous mindfulness is going to be quite a big challenge, but it's an aspiration we can work towards.
Okay, saying we can work toward it implies we don't achieve it. Exactly.
Is there a reason one can't be mindful of walking and chewing gum at the same time?
try being mindful of rubbing your head and patting your stomach at the same time, now that's a toughie :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
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No, "we're" not saying it. It was SpinyNorman's consideration.
The Buddha's instructions to his monks, in the sutta Spiny quoted, indicates that it's exactly how it's done, and CAN be done.
I'm not going by what Buddha said, I'm going by what I observe, even in Buddhist temples. I don't see people being mindful 24/7.
Maybe you have.
I'm not saying I have, or that it doesn't happen. Simply because I have never observed it for myself, does not indicate it is impossible.
I can't see microbes, or the creatures said to live in the roots of my eyelashes. Never have seen them, but I'm assured they exist.....
It is an instruction and recommendation of the Buddha. If he says it can be done, on the level of "truth" taught by him elsewhere, it's a pretty near damn sure thing that he's accurate....
I should try it, but like anything, it probably takes dedicated and consistent concentration of practice.
Jacqueline Du Pre ~~ was a cellist who practised for hours and hours on end, every day. I would suggest that made her a perfect performer, in comparison to someone who dedicates 20 minutes a day.....
(~~ That's her husband conducting, by the way.... Daniel Barenboim....)
Good 'un.
Hey ... I can chew gum and sit on my ... er meditate! Such talent.
I've never heard of that.
I'd like to add my question to @vinlyn's: Is it possible NOT to be mindful 24/7?
[Forgive me if it sounds flip, but the situation of being or not being mindful reminds me of the ancient joke about the fellow who had a golden screw in his belly button. It didn't hurt, but he wanted to get it out. He prayed and prayed and one day a set of stairs descended from the sky. He climbed the stairs. At the top he found a golden screw driver. He took the screwdriver and unscrewed his golden screw....
and his ass fell off.]
Don't forget mindfulness develops a mind of its own. Mindfulness can and does become a habit and automatic response, and we ought to keep an open, undecided mind on what exactly "24/7 Mindfulness" even LOOKS like. I try to question my automatic suppositions when they pop up. How the hell do I know, or any part of me?
Watch out for trying to figure this out as if it were some kind of conundrum. There's no conundrum in how mindfulness happens. All conundrums are problems with the way you think mindfulness works or what it is. Solution --open up your mind
Mindfulness doesn't need you to define it or puzzle its workings 
Yes.
That does not mean mindful of every part of our potential consciousness simultaneously but it does mean very much increased awareness or attention to our being.
How does that work?
It means the multitasking monkey mind does not go into fantasies, memories, day dreams, mind chatter but stays on the walk, the chew and the mindful being . . . not only is this the point of practice, it is from my and many peoples experience entirely possible . . .
. . . gosh I feel so New Agey . . .
My teacher says the nature of mind is to focus but also fade out. Artificially trying to have only the focus can result in sickness of mind because the minds nature is to also fade out.
Additionally my teacher doesn't like the term 'mindfulness' because it gives this wrong view of the mind as 'unrelenting concentration'. She translates smirti as 'awareness' rather than mindfulness. The reason is that our attention comes from awareness and the nature of mindfulness is the same as the nature of the mind. The mind naturally focuses and defuses. This goes along with a quality of the universe as manifesting and non-manifesting.
An interesting experiment to try is 'try not being mindful on purpose', it's a weird feeling
Good plan. A day of that would be most useful . . . I wonder how it will pan out for the purposeless . . .
@vinlyn
How did you observe people not being mindful 24 / 7?
How did you measure that?
Besides it is not 24/7 sleeping time is off I think. And do you mean 24/7/52 or just for a day or two?
How about the forest tradition? Did you evaluate them as well? I mean the monasteries off from civilisation?
I have seen monks being mindfull in everyday chores. But never stuck around to see if they could do it for a day.
If you (anyone) are interested in a homework project to understand the view of the mindfulness as diffusing and focusing here is a resource from Trungpa Rinpoche:
http://www.shambhalamedia.org/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=DVX108
In the vajrayana tradition of Buddhism, E is the feminine principle of immense wisdom and space that pervades all of experience; VAM is the masculine principle of indestructible skillful means and compassion, which is also the experience of great bliss. In these digitally remastered videos of the 1976 Boulder seminar, Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche examines how the principle of EVAM, the unity of the feminine and masculine, operates at each stage of the Buddhist path. Talk titles include
Let's see...a Buddhist monk kicking a dog in the ribs. Mindful?
A Buddhist abbot gardening while his dong dong is hanging out of his robes...in front of women. Mindful?
A group of Buddhist monks delighting in playing with their fancy cell phones. Mindful?
A Buddhist monk falling asleep (and falling over) during chanting. Mindful?
Did he mention all monks, or just 'monks'....?
@Vinlyn, you're enjoying an argumentative period at the moment.... maybe you could rein back a little bit on the 'strictly scientific' and relax that hold a little?
Iam really curious myself.
I cannot say I have seen anybody do the feat but I have never really tried.
So I am wondering how sure your method of evaluation is?
A Buddhist abbot gardening while his dong dong is hanging out of his robes...in front of women. Mindful?
A group of Buddhist monks delighting in playing with their fancy cell phones. Mindful?
A Buddhist monk falling asleep (and falling over) during chanting. Mindful?
Whoah ... is there some sort of Buddhist National Enquirer you're reading these days?
Really?! :#
Really?! :#
No Silver, those are things I have observed personally.
But I am waiting for someone to somehow demonstrate to me that there are people out there, whether monks or lay, that are mindful all of their waking hours. I'm not talking about theoretical, I'm talking about real.
I'm not arguing that being mindful is not a good and desirable thing. My personal experience -- not that that means much -- is that I practice mindfulness for periods of time, depending on the activity. If I'm watching a Kevin Hart comedy concert, I don't want to be practicing mindfulness. I just wanna laugh. If I just wanna take a walk and enjoy looking at the snow, I don't want to work at it; I just want to enjoy it. When I put my headphones on and listen to some favorite music, I may want to drift back and think of when I went to that concert a few years ago. But if I'm in a parent conference, I want to be mindful. If I'm meeting with my surgeon, I want to be mindful. If I'm driving at 75 mph on the way to Denver, I want to be mindful.
So when I hear people say or imply that they're always mindful, well, I just haven't experienced that, and I really wonder if they have either.
Federica is correct, I am probing kinda hard here...in reality, in this discussion I am being mindful. She wants me to relax about it...in other words, not be so mindful.
Yogi Berra apparently once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Well Yogi, I'm just about there.
As to the question of "can one be mindful 24/7 ?"
It is certainly** possible** to maintain mindfulness 24/7 in monastic circumstances where there is a support structure for it and you have actually made mindfulness a bigger priority than anything else in life.
It can simply become an accumulative habituated awareness with just as much inertia as mindlessness has with no support or inclination to be otherwise.
It is also possible to maintain mindfulness 24/7 for days, months or years following kensho or satori or bigger awakenings.
Personally I also think one should run such a mindfulness through repeated sceenings of the 4NT & 8 FP to recheck whether one has not just confused mindfulness for right mindfulness. (over developing one spoke of the 8FP at the cost of allowing any of the other spokes to atrophy)
I am not sure whether ones doubts of what is or is not possible for anyone else to do with mindfulness is of much importance when each new nano second is just another chance to see what you can do with it.
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I doubt, in your current, super-analytical frame of mind, even if we were to recount such an experience, that you would believe us.
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Well, in that case, try extending the periods of time. I believe 'Right effort' is mentioned somewhere....
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Ah, well there's your problem right there. It might be possible, but you don't want to do it. You're being selective.
Being Mindful isn't about a choice. If you're going to - determinedly - be Mindful, it's a dedication to constant Effort.
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Yours is a choice. But your doubts simply transmit your own reluctance to practice, and with that, you assume the same of others.
Bit of a damned cheek, if I may say so....
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No, I want you to be MORE mindful, and less intransigent, less inflexible. Isn't Science about exploration and discovery, and not flat-out disbelief and denial....?
You asked, but gee, do I dare answer?
Well, here goes. No, science is not about being more intransigent or being less intransigent. It is about going where the data takes you. The scientific method is about making an hypothesis (a proposed explanation for a phenomenon), setting up a way to test the hypothesis, collecting data, and coming to a conclusion. If a scientist has data with a high level of confidence, he should be intransigent about that until there is data with a higher level of confidence.
But I'm not being intransigent. I'm being doubtful. Is it possible to be mindful all your waking hours? Perhaps, but I doubt it...because I've never seen anybody like that.
There are (or were) comedians out there -- Robin Williams, Red Skelton, maybe Kevin Hart -- who people say are "always on". But when you learn a little about their private lives -- the divorces or suicides -- you find out they were not "always on".
I worked with a fellow school administrator once who people would say, "the wheels are always turning". It was great in a work session. It wasn't so great at lunch, or out to dinner, or at a party. And then you'd hear people saying, "Give it a rest." And when that person had a nervous break down, then the wheels weren't turning anymore, they were off the track.
I just think there's a healthy balance. I think one's mind needs to rest once in a while.
Yes. Confirmed.
Some of us, me for example, not having the maturity to protect my insight have done this for years.
However awakening does not mean that even such awakeners do not have a market place, hell realm or other mindless personal or environmental swamp to return to, just for fun . . . kind of a rebirth in this very life time . . .
However for us imperfect Samsarians, the priority is the wake up call.
. . . and now back to open day . . .
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Pay attention. (There's 'Mindfulness' for you!!)
I didn't say anything about science being more/less intransigent. That would be your attitude, not a quality of Science.
I asked whether Science wasn't about exploration and discovery...
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And by your admission YOU have done none of that....
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Yes, all well and good - but he doesn't sit back and wait for the proof and evidence to come to him. He sets about investigating matters for himself, doesn't he....?
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Scepticism is a suitable quality. Flat-out doubt is more questionable.
If all scientists 'doubted' things, then there would be less research carried out, wouldn't there? An air of pessimism would pervade every new question...
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"learn" being the operative word, which might at least imply some personal interest or research...
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Smoke and mirrors. That wasn't being 'Mindful'. That was not knowing when to stop the wheels grinding which is a different matter altogether....
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And being Mindful takes that into consideration. What do you think Meditation is?
It's giving the monkey Mind a break. It's calm abiding.
You think there's a healthy balance.
But you don't know, because you have decided to NOT investigate and see matters for yourself.
You have no idea whether increasing Mindfulness makes you feel more rested or not.
I can tell you when I practise Mindfulness, I feel more calm, unhurried, un-stressed and at peace, than when I don't....I don't see how increasing that state, can make me feel worse....
You're so intransigent.
Oh no I'm not. (Pantomime season coming up. Just rehearsing....
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I think one's mind needs to rest once in a while.
Meditation can be used that way.
At the risk of making a complicated discussion even more so, I would like to chime in with a story about mindfulness I might have told before in some discussion. If you've heard me tell it before, excuse a forgetful old man.
Many years ago when I was passionate about this thing called Zen Buddhism I had found, I fixated on this thing called mindfulness. That was something I could understand and, above all, actually work on without a Teacher telling me if my answer to a koan was correct or not.
So I called a friend who had a camper permanently set up in the beautiful hills of Southern Ohio and they let me use it. No electricity, no phone, no neighbors, just trees and nature and me doing some power meditation. I decided to be mindful 24-7 but knew it would take less distractions.
As you can imagine, I lasted two whole days before my mind was so bored I couldn't take it anymore. So I got the bright idea to do walking meditation. I struck out into the surrounding trees, being mindful of every leaf and tree and bird and deer I passed in my walk.
And after a few hours, I stopped, looked around at the trees, and realized I was totally lost. I was so busy being mindful of each tree that I had neglected to pay attention to where I was going. All the trees and streams and rocks I had seen along the way were now a jumbled mess in my memory.
So I started walking in one direction (I was a Boy Scout in my younger days so knew how to use the sun) and eventually found a country road cutting though some fields. I got back to the camper about the time it got dark, lesson learned.
I was so focused on being mindful, I forgot to pay attention to what I was doing.
So mindfulness is a valuable and necessary tool in our practice, but it's not enlightenment, no more than meditation is enlightenment. Mindfulness is the focus of our attention, that's all.
I think we need to ask, "Mindful of what?"
I see the term mindfullness bandied about a lot and no one ever explains just what it is we should or are supposed to be mindfull of.
In truth we are mindfull all the time. Like Vinlynn's example of the monk with his schlong hanging out. Sure, he was being mindful. He just wasn't being mindfull about what his Johnson was doing.
Thats why they say that when you realize that your mind has gone walkabout, you "return to the breath" You're supposed to be mindfull of your breathing as a practice. If you're thinking about your lousy day at work, then you're not following the instruction. You suddenly become aware/mindfull of this state and remember the instruction and resume the practice. That's what I think it's really about. Being mindfull isn't and end in itself. It's a tool to help our practice and not the practice itself.
@Chaz stole the words out of my mouth.
Being mindful does not need to imply a positive connotation.
Being mindful can also include darker shades of the spectre, like being mindful of a grumpy moment, of rising anger, of a resentful grudge...
Just resting in awareness of whatever the present moment brings with it, whatever we happen to be experiencing right here and now.
The nice and the ugly.
Are you that fairy in British pantomime (or is my memory wrong?)?> @DhammaDragon said:
Interesting!
What fairy in what British pantomime?
Edit: I'm more like one of the witches in Macbeth, but I can be a Colombina too
Somewhere back on some old Christmas special filmed in England, I seem to remember a skit in which Petula Clark (?) performed about the British "pantomime tradition". Seemed like it inferred that in many such tales there was also the coming of some kind of female fairy. Of course, I may be totally mixing that all up. But it stuck in my brain.
I'm not practicing mindfulness 24/7/365 as such, but I am mindful 24/7/365 of my thoughts, words and deeds...Which in a sense means each day I set the thought stream on positive "Auto Pilot" (through meditation) and the awareness alarm goes off if they deviate off track in an unwholesome manner...More often than not nipping unwholesome thoughts in the bud....
:-)
Yes.
Being mindfull is simple awarenesss in the present.
I am hungry
I am happy
I am sad
I'm thinking
I'm feeling
My Johnson is hanging out.
This is only a step, though. It is not the end. When we are mindfull of the fact we're having an itch, lets say, we can use that awareness to help analyse the phenomena. We then see the itch as impermanent, dreamlike, ephemral, and then POOF we're a step closer to complete Enlightenment.
If theres a mindfullness conundrum, it's that we don't really understand the role of mindfullness as it relates to practice.
The Good Fairy of course! Cinderella's fairy, for one.... Don't you know ANYTHING about mad-cap british pantomimes?? Really! :trollface:
Yeah, that sounds about right. But is it correct that in British pantomime people do talk?
Don't hold your breath.
This is the wrong approach. What a monks can or can't do, is immaterial. What I can do is immaterial.
What matters is what you can do. If you want to find out if mindfullness can be applied 24/7, looking towards what can be observed in another is a fool's errand. If you want to know if it's possible, get to work and find out for yourself. It will take years and perhaps lifetimes to get to that point, but it's the only way you'll find out.
It's what the Buddha taught us: to see for ourselves.
If you're unwilling to do that, it hardly seems fair to criticise an idea you're unwilling to investigate for yourself.
Chaz, that's the best post in this thread.
True dat. And big respect, at least it was on-topic....
It's only 9 degrees here at 2 p.m. in Colorado Springs.
(The devil made me do it).
Thanks everyone. These responses are so insightful and entertaining that I am almost ashamed to admit that my original "conundrum" question was only half serious.