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What's the point of mindfulness?
DairyLama
Veteran Veteran
People often talk about the importance of mindfulness as an aspect of Buddhist pratice, but what's it for? What's the point of mindulness?
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Mindlessness is brain tripping up.
The point of all these practices is freedom.
Though there is an element of allowing things to be as they are. For instance we can just be with tension or sadness. But that's elementary. We have to learn what conditions allow such tension and sadness. Even happiness and joy. What are the conditions? What happens when we play with conditions and finally when we gather insight from our exploration into constructions, what does that lead to in the mind, in the body, in the beingness?
Are we letting go or are we clinging harder. And over and over again we use mindfulness to see how stuff happens.
It doesnt require a point.
Just as reality doesn't require anything but you to substantiate it.
So the things I do, say and think bring no harm to others or myself.
It's like using a saw and not paying attention to where your hand's at :hair:
Mindfulness and concentration are ways of stopping.
Ultimately the point of mindfulness and concentration is to make us see what the Buddha saw when his eyes fell on the Morningstar.
The Buddha cannot transmit what exactly happened at that moment.
In order to do that he would have to move away from it, look at it from a distance and fit it into some conceptual framework. Then the concept can be transmitted.
That’s great; but that concept can’t be turned back into the experience by us – his audience –when we don’t have a corresponding experience to relate it to.
So instead he showed us a path of getting at a similar point where we stop and experience what he experienced.
Mindfulness and concentration are at the core - I think – of that path.
Stress is your response to stimuli.
Mindfulness may allow you to modify your response along a gradient of automatic to conscious - it is not however the stimuli and not the response.
"One tries to abandon wrong action and to enter into right action: This is one's right effort.
One is mindful to abandon wrong action & to enter & remain in right action: This is one's right mindfulness.
Thus these three qualities — right view, right effort, & right mindfulness — run & circle around right action."
'Energy' is a word that is banded about with little care... in this context, we're presumably not talking about the type of metabolised fuel/energy that allows organic functions... I suppose we are discussing 'opportunity in time'... as in, I am focusing when I could be doing something else...
Again, whichever way I look at this it doesnt seem to fit... if it is fuel from metabolism then the link to mindfulness is what? the solution is eat more, not be less mindful... or if it is opportunity in time then again, I dont see how one would expend energy when in fact the opportunity in time is not used to fabricate a reality but rather to let go of fabrications and accept/integrate reality as it naturally is... that would seem to take less energy (no energy) in the sense that one preserves the opportunity in time to expend on the natural experience of reality (rather than in obsessive fabrication) - or in any event it occurs simultaneously to the experience of natural reality.
What you describe sounds more like anxiety and lack of confidence than mindfulness.
I think it can be as you say. But then isn't awareness having those qualities?
smirti is the word I believe.
My teacher likes for us to look at the associations we make with various words. And then find within our own tendancies some kind of insight we already have. She finds that 'awareness' points her students into some different insights than 'mindfulness'. And she wants her students to use both terms to investigate. For her own tendancies she likes awareness better than mindfulness.
Sorry this is edited a lot ^ I can't seem to ever get a post right the first time
The commonality of the meditation methods (your article and my teacher) is that they both develope equanimity.
But we are letting go of bad habits and returning to what we already have as the nature of our minds.
Rather we just note "thinking" and return to the outbreath and note the way our mind opens to the space of the whole affair. The quality of our mind that we uncover is the opening and spaciousness in combination with the clarity to know what it was that we were thinking and the sensation we had during the whole affair.
Patient, open, non-judgmental awareness of what is present in the this current moment provides the room for insight and acceptance. The habitual reaction of holding on or pushing away what arises in the mind can only be let go of when awareness is present.
I think of mindfulness as meditation off the cushion.
Best Wishes
It is why I tend to just sit . . . 'finish' and just get up . . . a lot less effort . . . simples. :hiding:
Without it, I'd be too distracted to answer.
I know sati has the literal meaning of remembering, but I'm not sure what this means in practice - apart from remembering to be mindful - could you elaborate on this point?
I've probably got some of this garbled, but I am very impressed with my teachers presentation. It seems more realistic and 'relaxed lute string' not to try to have bare awareness always vigilant; the nature of mind is to relax sometimes too. Otherwise how do we as buddhists get to sit down and veg out? That would be no fair.
Many people find it hard to practise mindfulness, not because it is unnatural but because the way we live in Western society encourages mindlessness. But with practice it is liberating and the source of all insight.
For instance we can bring metta with mindfulness and this brings a letting go and kindness to what arises.
But that is a very dualistic way of seeing.
Mindfullness is exactly the letting go, kindness, metta, and object. It isn't a solid entity, but a process of attention arisen due to conditions.
So bare attention or seeing what is has its merits and may lead towards the beautiful. It surely brings letting go.
But that isn't enough in Buddhism.
Buddhism requires us to see how with mindfulness we build the world and how we can deconstruct the world.
What can we bring with mindfulness that leads to letting go and peace and the highest happiness?
For instance with mindfulness I can bring impermanence. I can look at everything with the lens of impermanence and this brings a gentle letting go.
So there is more to mindfulness than say just being with our suffering. We must learn the conditions and learn to play with conditions so that we can end the process of construction. Then we may know liberation.
Prevents a lot of weight of worry from being put on my shoulders. That brings me peace. Peace a form of happiness for me.
Peace is underrated nowadays.
If you're unmindful to the current moment, it means you're usually fretting about the past--which you can't change--or agonizing over the future, which hasn't happened yet so you don't know if/how you can affect it. Meanwhile, you miss out on the one moment you can shape best, which is right now. Since all past moments, present moments, and future moments were, are, or will be "right now," if we treat each moment as right now, we're giving our entire life the best attention possible.
Says the woman who's broken many a glass when washing dishes and fretting about past or future, often simultaneously.