Vintage Roots

As modern conceptualisations of mindfulness evolve and expand and, occasionally, stretch to the point of near meaninglessness (mindful mushroom-picking, anyone?), revisiting first principles is a journey worth taking.

Early Buddhist psychology, from which major elements of contemporary theory and practice derive, offers a range of concise definitions and colourful similes to illuminate precisely what the mental quality of mindfulness is and what it does.

Here is a short summary of just one of the numerous categorisations of sati (the term for mindfulness in the Pali Canon). This list relates to the key characteristics of sati’s activity:

Monitoring: Mindfulness is understood to monitor, supervise and steer other mental qualities. It is described as a ‘watchful charioteer’. This simile highlights sati’s qualities of steering and supervision of other mental faculties together with its vigilant nature, which can note specific objects on a journey (inner or outer) whilst simultaneously maintaining a balanced and broad awareness that serves the smooth and successful passage of the journey as a whole. 

Integrating: Mindfulness is a regulative, organising activity in meditation, which notes any lacks and deficiencies, brings in appropriate qualities and suitably applies them.

Stabilising: Mindfulness exerts a stabilising function in regard to sensory distraction, as described in the ‘simile of the post’, which likens six animals to the six sense organs of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. These sense organs can be restrained by the ‘strong post’ of sati, which exerts a stabilising function in regard to sensory distraction through its ability to tether the senses and ‘keep them near’. In this way, mindfulness remains aloof and impartial, but also connected to what is happening at the sense doors.

Protecting: Mindfulness guards the mind by helping to prevent the arising of unwholesome states through its clear view of a situation, as highlighted in the simile of the gatekeeper. Such a protective role comes about through sati’s ability to exert a controlling influence on thoughts and intentions.

Applying ‘detached’ observation: Mindfulness is a calm and non-reactive type of attention, which ‘stands back’ to observe phenomena, rather than interfere with them. It helps one experience all feelings with a detached outlook. This offers a more objective stance towards one’s experience. It is sometimes referred to as ‘bare attention’, a key aspect of sati in that it both encourages sense-restraint and allows one to see things as they have come to be, unadulterated by habitual reactions and projections.

Life By Autocue

As outlined in the previous post, it can be tricky to fully know what the mind is up to, moment to moment, as life unfolds in its typically novel, mundane, stimulating and ambiguous ways.

Investigating this process through mindfulness reveals intriguing truths about the behaviour of the mind. Many mental responses, such as reactivity to perceived threats, are hardwired. Learned habits and tendencies can seem equally fixed. Through practising awareness, we come to realise that we routinely operate in automatic ways.

Automaticity is not a bad thing. It confers advantages through allowing mental attention to dexterously flit to phenomena unrelated to the task-in-hand. Hence we can walk down a street and fiddle on our phones and make plans for next week because the act of walking down a street is not something we need to figure out or perfect anymore.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

The downside to automaticity is that we fail to show up for the occasion of our own lives and so rob ourselves of its innate vividness and many of its joys. You probably know the experience (retrospectively at least) of becoming so distracted that you lose all sense of what happens next, only to ‘come to’ sometime later.

The potential for profound disconnection from present moment experience is all the greater in this age of the internet and social media. With powerful technologies at our fingertips, we are encouraged and seduced into consuming information speedily and superficially. How our minds love to skim vast directories of language and inexhaustible banks of imagery in their quest for instant gratification.

Even when we are relatively undistracted and alive to our sensory experience, it is easy for our minds to unconsciously react to a flutter of boredom, a pang of desire or an unpleasant sensation and, before we know it, our fingers are swiping screens and our eyes or ears are glued to some arbitrary object in a virtual world. Before smartphones came along, the possibilities for such mental hijacking weren’t quite so endless.

Non-Superficiality

When we get distracted, we act without awareness of acting, that is, we do not see and comprehend what is happening as it is happening. Often it goes something like this: a subtle feeling arises, either pleasant or unpleasant (e.g. sensual desire, boredom, restlessness) => the mind reacts by seeking to either maintain or build up the feeling (if it’s pleasant) or to flee from or get rid of the feeling (if it’s unpleasant) => the reaction conditions a behaviour, such as the physical act of reaching for a phone or the mental act of going into thought and fantasy.

By contrast, when there is an awareness of the initial feeling, this chain reaction does not happen in the same way. The mind does not run off. It stays with the felt experience. Blind reactivity abates. Ensuing actions arise out of clear intentions. There is a sense of stability and agency.

This is mindfulness: the ability to stay with experience for a prolonged time, and to really investigate it in detail. It is the opposite of distractedness. In fact, one of the classical characterisations of mindfulness (from the Abhidhamma, an early collection of teachings in the Buddhist tradition) is ‘non-superficiality’. This is the understanding of how mindfulness does not skim over the surface or ascertain in a shallow way. It sinks into an object and facilitates a deeper knowing of it.

When you are mindful, experience deepens. This is a natural capacity you have, which is cultivated through practice. It is a lot more likely to happen when your phone is switched off.

The Proliferating Mind

I sit down to meditate. I commit the next minutes of my life to the practice of mindfulness of breathing. The meditation bell sounds to signal the start. A few moments pass. I notice a mild pang of hunger in my belly. An image of chocolate – its taste, texture and colour – flashes across my mind. I note this and gently, patiently, return attention to the breath.

More moments pass. Sensations in my belly continue to draw my attention. Somewhere far in the background there is a vague knowing that my mind is discreetly launching one of its advertising campaigns to convince me that the desire for food is more fulfilling than meditation. I know from experience this is not true, but I am prone to forgetting, which is what happens next.

Off to the Movies

Before I’m wise to it, the cinema screen of my mind is spontaneously manifesting assorted scenes from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It then proceeds, for no apparent reason, to critique Gene Wilder’s performance in the lead role before tumbling headlong into a miscellany of Gene’s movies – random scenes, bits of dialogue, a hodgepodge of sound and vision. Little do I know it but my mind has galloped off to the movies and mindfulness of breathing is history…

… What an intriguing guy Gene Wilder was... Such a great face… The way he seemed to hold in all that emotion, you never quite knew what was going on with him.... I wonder how he chose his parts… I wonder what he was like in real life… That scene in Blazing Saddles when he raises his voice in that funny way of his reminds me of that weird song he sings on the boat trip in the Chocolate Factory… oh yeah, chocolate… Young Frankenstein was funny, though, wasn’t it?… What about his mate Richard Pryor’s stand-up? He must’ve been outrageous back in the day…

On and on chatters the mind.

… and how about Bill Hicks?… He was dynamite… His skit about the first Gulf War was razor-sharp… The media frenzy around that war was out of control, wasn’t it?… They used to call the Vietnam War “the first television war”, didn’t they?... That documentary on Vietnam narrated by Peter Coyote was a cut above the usual, wasn’t it?... Peter Coyote was in ET, wasn’t he?… I didn’t think I was going to watch all that documentary… But I did, didn’t I?… Ten episodes in all, yeah… It’s a pity the hard drive didn’t record half of one of the episodes… Was it Episode 3 or 4?... I can’t remember…

And on and on.

… What a shame that old Vietnam movie, Go Tell The Spartans, starring Burt Lancaster and that other guy whose name I can’t remember, didn’t get more acclaim at the time… It was ahead of its time… At least a year ahead of Apocalypse Now… Or was it two?... Burt was great… His character in The Swimmer was tragic and deluded... That last scene is kind of eerie… I remember watching that film while eating three bags of salt and vinegar crisps… That’s one bag of crisps too many, isn’t it?… I’m really hungry… Some chocolate would be nice… Willy Wonka had a factory full of the stuff, didn't he?... What an intriguing guy Gene Wilder was…

The interval bell sounds marking the halfway point of the meditation period.

Double Bill

The sound of the bell triggers a momentary retrieval of awareness, though not for long. All this mental monkeying about has gathered energy around itself. It fires up again and blasts off in a new direction…

… This is useless… I haven’t even started meditating… Why do I never learn?... It’s really simple, just watch the breath… Stop wasting your time and focus… Focus focus focus… Why has this happened to me?... Is it just me?... Maybe it’s just me!?... What if I never sort this out?... Maybe everyone can meditate, but I can’t… Concentrate, concentrate!… No, relax, don’t push, then concentrate… Gentle, easy does it… One moment at a time… I’m pretty sure it was Episode 4 that got lost on the hard drive… I definitely watched all of Episode 3… The one after Episode 2, that’s right… I wonder what’s up with the hard drive… It was a cut above average, that series… They called Vietnam “the first television war”, didn’t they?...

There comes a point when I wake up to what’s happening – the wandering, the reminiscing, the brooding. The sheer nonsense of it all. I catch the mind blundering about its virtual universe, storyboarding its own demented manoeuvres. Finally, I am awake to what is actually going on. I have recollected my intention to practise mindfulness of breathing. And, right then, the bell rings to signal the end of the meditation period!

No Refunds

If such an experience during meditation is in any ways familiar to you, know that you are not alone. Human minds are prone to conceptual proliferation. The content may vary but the process is the same. In the example above, note the webs of thought that spin outwards and loop in inconsequential patterns. Note the chains of association and petty judgements. Note the implicit self-absorption and self-referencing. Note the lack of awareness of this self-view. Note the lack of empowerment of the intention to be present to what is occurring in the here and now with equanimity. In terms of meditation, note the complete waste of time.

Conceptual proliferation is the tendency of the mind, once triggered by some perception or other, to ‘spread outwards’ into strings of thought that appear solid and real, not ephemeral and ever-changing. This gives rise to a strong sense of ‘me’ (the thinker and believer of the thoughts) that is separate from the world ‘outside of me’.

This invariably leads to a sense of tension or pressure because there is some longing for something I haven’t got or frustration at things not being the way I want them to be. Since this process is happening out of awareness, no insight is possible. Therefore, the mind learns nothing and keeps tangling itself up in its own nets. When ‘I’ finally wise up to what’s happening, at best it’s been a farce. If the thought-content is less innocuous, it may well feel more like a horror movie. Whatever the emotional impact, it’s always a waste of time.

Start Again

When you spot conceptual proliferation in action, this is a ‘good’ moment, that is, a moment of strong mindfulness. Stay attentive. Watch the show without getting lost in it. Refuse to be seduced. Become aware of emotional responses to the wordplay and imagery of the mind. Feel the feelings. Explore how emotions build themselves up through thoughts. Can you feel the restlessness of the mind in the body? Can you sense the compulsive energy to leap from thought to thought? Keep watching. Keep feeling. If you lose track, start again, one moment at a time. Ease and clarity can flourish under such conditions.

Another route out of conceptual proliferation is to track back through the chain of thought that led to the whole blossoming of nonsense in the first place. When you notice your mind has wandered off, review the thoughts that have arisen to find where they arose from. It will likely be some sort of association with a bodily sensation, sound, smell, random memory or idea. When you find what it is, stay with that, just recognising it and feeling its resonance. Just for a few moments. Then let go and return to the breath. Start again. Spending an entire sitting period ‘starting again’ is, in meditation terms, time well spent.

Getting Tranquillised

In this so-called ‘age of anxiety’, there is a notable and understandable tendency to view calm states as desirable. There can be an equally strong tendency to conflate ‘calm’ with ‘mindfulness’.

For sure, there are connections between the two terms. But they have quite different meanings. The confusion seems to lie in a distorted view of mindfulness meditation as being some kind of bliss technology. Mindfulness has more to do with waking up to reality than with calming down*.

The prevalence of this confusion was brought home to me when I was asked to write a ‘puff piece’ about mindfulness for a glossy magazine on behalf of a health clinic I work at. Not that anyone asked me for a ‘puff piece’, of course, these things always go without saying. Feeling conciliatory, I duly obliged.

What mattered to me when writing the piece were two related things. First, to do my best not to mislead any readers new to mindfulness. Second, to dispel the misunderstanding that mindfulness is meant to be a way of calming down.

The latter seemed easy enough. I simply wrote: 'Mindfulness is often misunderstood as a way of calming down.' For good measure, later I noted that 'mindfulness is not about trying to maintain tranquil states.'

Flower Power

When the piece was published, I wondered why I’d bothered. On the front cover, the editors had used the cover line ‘Mindfulness and Calm’. On the page adjoining the article, there was a full-page exercise entitled ‘Colour Me Calm’ (it was a flowery pattern that you colour in, presumably to calm you down).

The image chosen to accompany my piece was of a woman gracefully jumping off a log in a field. This was no ordinary jump. She was looking skyward, with arms outstretched, as if divinely inspired and on the verge of ascending to the heavens, rather than merely plummeting to the grass.

The combined effect of these editorial inputs was to strongly imply that mindfulness is all about achieving or abiding in a state of serenity. On the bright side, it was a good lesson for me in how little control I have over other people’s preconceptions, no matter how hard I might try.

The irony was that I felt a lot less calm when I saw the published piece. This was a nice glimpse into how I go grasping after definitive truth and conceptual clarity, taking my own words oh-so-seriously in the process. How my mind loves to get lost in its thicket of views and opinions! Perhaps I should be grateful to that editor for the wake-up call.

* Tranquillity is generally understood to be a beneficial quality in classical and contemporary mindfulness practices, but it is not considered to be an end in itself. That said, there has always existed a path of practice called ‘calm-abiding’. This is characterised by an emphasis on developing one-pointed concentration in such a way as to be conducive to accessing refined mental states. Such methods are not commonly taught as part of generic eight-week programmes (an exception being loving-kindness meditation). 

Reality Check

In our over-stimulated, highly spun and monetised world, it can be hard to know what’s for real. Whatever ‘mindfulness’ is supposed to be about, it’s not stimulation, spin and money. So how do we sort the wheat from the chaff?

Stress, busyness and distraction are unlikely to aid one’s efforts to seek out what’s nourishing and discard the husks. But mindfulness, if it prizes anything, prizes wise discernment and the importance of knowing for oneself. So try we must.

Paths have a tendency to get overgrown, to get clogged up with detritus and to lose their markings. Inner paths are no different. Knowing when your path is blocked is wisdom in action.

To skilfully engage with struggles and obstacles that you encounter is to learn something important – that they are friendly forces in disguise, indeed opportunities for learning and growth. Trusting this comes with practice.

No Obstructions

For me, the penny really dropped when an experienced meditation teacher told me that 95% of meditation practice is working with the so-called ‘hindrances’ of sensual desire, ill will, restlessness, dullness and drowsiness, and sceptical doubt. Up to that point, I’d thought it was just me.

Since then, I have come to appreciate that the human birthright is to encounter powerful psychological forces that disturb and obscure inner clarity. Encountering these forces is an indication that there is some form of mental grasping at work.

But it is also a sign that the mind is bringing to light an unskilful habit, which softens and releases through awareness, so such moments are an occasion to rejoice. Really!