Topic 13.8. Mindfulness is Witnessing the Cosmos in Action

Mindfulness is Witnessing the Cosmos in Action

If you let cloudy water settle, it will become clear.

If you let your upset mind settle,

your course will also become clear.

Buddha

Meditation with Mindfulness is right action. It is the cosmic path to manifesting abundance in your life.

What is Meditation?

Meditation is a simple way to experience the natural peace that exists within us. Sitting quietly and being relaxed, we can tune out from the world of ‘content’ for a moment, whilst we consciously go into the experience of being light, free, peaceful and real.

Meditation taps into the order and stillness embedded in and behind all activity, however chaotic activities may appear, by using our faculty of attention. It is not, as commonly thought, an inward manipulation, like turning on a switch or merely relaxing into some ‘special state’ where ‘everything is beautiful’, feels different, or better, or where your mind goes blank, or where you suppress your thoughts. It is a systematic and sustained observation of the whole field of our experience, or some specific elements of it. This leads to the creation of appropriate thoughts and actions.

There are many different meditative disciplines. We could think of them all as various doors opening into the same room. Each doorway presents a unique and different view into the room. Once inside, however, it is the same room, whichever door we have come through.

Mindful Meditation

Mindfulness means moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. It is cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally, in the present moment and then sustaining that attention over time, as best we can. In the process, we become more in touch with our life in the present moment, as it unfolds.

Ordinarily, we live much of our time on automatic pilot, paying attention only selectively and haphazardly, taking many important things completely for granted or not noticing them at all and judging everything we do experience through forming rapid and often unexamined opinions based on what we like or dislike, what we want or don’t want. Mindfulness brings to our lives, especially parenting, a powerful method and framework for paying attention to whatever we are doing in each moment and seeing past the veil of our automatic thoughts and feelings to a deeper actuality.

Mindfulness is essential for spiritual practice, because no matter what spiritual tradition you follow, you must have a mind that is able to stay in the present moment, if your understanding and experience are to deepen. The practice is simple and completely feasible. Just by sitting and doing nothing, you are doing a tremendous amount.

Here are some practical aspects of actual mindfulness practice.

In mindfulness, or calm abiding, shamatha meditation, you are trying to achieve a mind that is stable and calm. What you begin to discover is, that this calmness, or harmony, is a natural aspect of the mind. Through mindfulness practice, you are just developing and strengthening the mind, and eventually, you will be able to remain peacefully in your mind without struggling. Your mind naturally feels contented.

An important point is, that when you are in a mindful state, there is still intelligence present – the pure intelligence of intuition (wisdom). It’s not as if you have blanked out. Sometimes people think that a person who is in deep meditation doesn’t know what’s going on – that it’s like being asleep. While there are meditative states where you deny sense perceptions their function, this is not an aim or the end result of shamatha practice.

Create a Favourable Environment

There are certain conditions that are helpful for the practice of mindfulness. When you create the right environment, it’s easier to practise.

It is beneficial if the place where you meditate, even if it’s only a small space in your apartment, has a feeling of upliftedness and sacredness about it. It is also preferable to meditate in a place that is not too noisy or disturbing and you should not be in a situation where your mind is going to be easily provoked into anger or jealousy or other emotions. If you are disturbed or irritated, then your practice is going to be affected.

Beginning Your Practice

I encourage you to meditate frequently but for short periods of time – ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes. If you force it too much, your practice can take on too much of a personality. Training the mind can be very, very simple. Sooo, you could meditate for ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening. During that time you are really working with the mind. Then just stop, get up and go.

Often some people just plop themselves down to meditate and just let the mind take them wherever it may lead. You have to create a personal sense of discipline. When you sit down, you can remind yourself: ‘I’m here to work on my mind. I’m here to train my mind.’ It’s okay to say that to yourself when you sit down, literally. Consider this as the kind of inspiration you need to begin your practise.

Posture

Your mind and body are connected, and your energy will flow better when your body is erect. However, if it is bent, the flow is changed and this directly affects your thought process. Yoga can help you to work with this. Remember that you are not sitting up straight because you’re trying to be a good schoolchild; you are sitting up with a straight back because your posture actually affects your mind.

If you need to use a chair to sit on for meditation, aim to sit upright with your feet touching the ground. If you use a meditation cushion, known in Japanese as a zafu or gomden, aim to establish a comfortable position with your legs crossed and your hands resting with your palms facing downwards, on your thighs. Your hips ought to neither rotate forwards too much, which creates tension, nor tilt back so far that you start slouching. Aim to cultivate a feeling of stability and strength about your sitting posture.

When you sit down, the first thing you need to do is to really have a sense of your body – really inhabit your body. It is common for people to prop themselves up and pretend they’re practising, but they can’t even feel their body; they can’t even feel where it is. So, you need to be right ‘here’ in your body. When you begin your meditation session, spend some time initially settling into your posture. Feel that your spine is being pulled up from the top of your head so that your posture is elongated, and then settle yourself down.

The basic principle is to maintain an upright, erect posture, in which you are in a solid situation: your shoulders are level, your hips are level, your spine is stacked up. You can visualise putting your bones in the right order and letting your flesh hang off that structure. This posture is useful in order to remain relaxed and awake. The practice you’re doing is very precise: you need to be very much awake, despite being calm. If you find yourself getting dull or hazy or falling asleep, you need to check your posture.

Your posture, feeling and the view in your mind and heart should be stable, still and peaceful like that of a mountain.

Gaze

Your view is the summation of your whole understanding and insight into the nature of Mind, which you bring to your meditation. So your view translates into and inspires your posture, expressing the core of your being in the way you sit.

Sit, then, as though you were a mountain, with all its unshakable, steadfast majesty. A mountain is completely relaxed and at ease with itself, however strong the winds that batter it, however thick the dark clouds that swirl around its peak.

Sitting like a mountain, let your mind rise, soar and fly.

For strict mindfulness practice, the gaze should be downward, focusing a couple of inches in front of your nose. Your eyes are open but not staring; your gaze is soft. You are trying to reduce sensory input as much as you can. People sometimes ask, ‘Shouldn’t we have a sense of the environment?’ but that’s not your concern in this practice. You are just trying to work with the mind and the more you raise your gaze, the more distracted you are going to be. It’s as if you had an overhead light shining over the whole room, and all of a sudden you focus it down right in front of you. You are purposefully ignoring what is going on around you. You are putting the ‘horse’ of the mind in a smaller ‘corral’.

Breath

When you do calm abiding (shamatha) practice, you become more and more familiar with your mind, and in particular, you learn to recognise the movement of the mind, which you experience as thoughts. Do this practice by using an object of meditation to provide a contrast or counterpoint, to what’s happening in your mind. As soon as you go off and start thinking about something, your awareness of the object of meditation will bring you back. You could place a rock, an image or a candle in front of you and use it to focus your mind, but using the breath as the object of meditation is particularly helpful, because it is relaxing, and you can do it anywhere, even when you don’t have your props handy.

As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are and then you begin to notice your breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath is spontaneous, and should not be forced. You need to be breathing naturally. Watch your breath as it flows out and in, out and out. With each successive breath, you will find yourself becoming more relaxed.

Thoughts

Regardless of the kind of thought that arises, say to yourself, ‘That may be a really important issue in my life, but right now is not the time to think about it. Now I’m practising meditation.’ Acknowledge the presence of the thought and let it go. It gets down to how honest you are, how true you can be to yourself, during each session.

Everyone gets lost in thought sometimes. You might think, ‘I can’t believe I got so absorbed in something like that’, but try not to make it too personal. Just try to be as unbiased as possible. Mind will be wild and we have to recognise that. You must not push yourself. If you’re trying to be completely concept-free, with no discursiveness at all, it’s just not going to happen.

Everything that we see around us is seen as it is because we have repeatedly solidified our experience of inner and outer reality in the same way, lifetime after lifetime and this has led to the mistaken assumption that what we see is objectively real. It is a shared dream we agree to call Reality. In fact, as we go further along the spiritual path, we learn how to work directly with our fixed perceptions. All of our old concepts of the world, or of matter, or even of ourselves, are purified and dissolved, and an entirely new, what you could call ‘heavenly’ field of vision, and perception opens up.

If the doors of perception were cleansed,

everything would appear . . . as it is, infinite.

William Blake

So through the labelling process, you simply see your discursiveness. Notice that you have been lost in thought, mentally label it ‘thinking’, then gently and without judgment come back to the breath. When you have a thought, no matter how wild or bizarre it may be, just let it go and come back to the breath, come back to the situation here and now.

Each meditation session is a journey of discovery, to understand the basic truth of who you are. In the beginning, the most important lesson of meditation is seeing the speed of the mind. However, the meditation tradition indicates that the mind doesn’t have to be this way: it just hasn’t been trained in stillness.

What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. Moreover, because you are working with the mind that experiences life directly, just by sitting and doing nothing, you are doing a tremendous amount.