No How and Know-How of Mindfulness
Mindfulness can’t be learned, and it can. It can’t be practised and it can. There can be moments even for a beginner that you find yourself mindful by nature, and there’s nothing to do at that moment but to recognise, appreciate and rest.
Those moments when pure awareness arises spontaneously, to recognise is not to do anything special. When you notice it, you are there. To appreciate, I suggest that you appreciate it like you appreciate a gentle breeze on a summer afternoon. You simply feel its presence with your whole body, and appreciate the beauty of the clarity and warmth of natural awareness.
And, rest? Letting go of all the usual support. Certainly don’t try to make sense of the experience. It has its own order. This is true refuge.
Such epiphanies will happen again and again, if you continue the practice of mindfulness. When you first experience it, naturally, you’ll want to name it, to grasp it. But it slips out of sight. Yet, as it happens again, you grasp less and less. Eventually you know, that the nameless boundlessness, as it turns out, knows; and, knows more than conceptualizing mind can know.
So, practise being in the present, allowing all the experiential interplay of body, felt life, and thoughts to present themselves and dissolve in spacious awareness. Get used to it, and when the utter openness of Being presents, rest into the flow of it.
You – the nameless – know, and you – the thinker – can’t know. Of course, you the nameless person learn to appreciate, and rest. Rest in peace, you might say, because you’re dying to your usual identity. You the person are is a living event, and so it is that knowing can occur through/in/as you. It can’t happen in a computer or a robot (sadly for the AI industry) – because, not being organic, they can’t feel their situations. Knowing needs bodily feeling.
(I take the view that this is so for deep knowing in dreamless sleep, or in meditation without feeling and perception. These states don’t happen without a body. The body is the background, on-going process, while those mental states occur. However, this is just a model – or a theory if you like. It’s not necessary to believe it, or not.)
Knowing is utterly mysterious. Though, what is verifiable is that you won’t find the knower in any content. The knowing (or the knower, if you wish to risk the label) is nameless – as intimate than the spacious ground of your mind.
Where does it leave us? Well, having said that, I’m going to transgress, and suggest some actions of a light-of-touch attention. Most of the time, you’re active. You’re walking, sitting, standing, or lying down – and maybe there’s crouching, as a twelve-year-old child suggested to me once – and so you always have opportunities for moments of presence.
Whatever the activity, the bodily-felt knowing of your total situation is available as your whole-body awareness. That pointer is there in the opening passages of the ‘Mindlessness of Breathing Sutta; that is, in the training to know our breathing with our whole body. Know with your whole breathing body that you are walking, standing, sitting, standing, crouching, talking, listening.
Your knows what it is to be present. You know what it’s like to be mindless, don’t you? Or, at least you have an aftertaste of the mindlessness, when you pop out of it. You’ve gone five minutes past the turn off to a familiar destination, and you haven’t noticed what you’re doing, then suddenly – pop! You’re out of your mindlessness.
Or, you’re meditating, and suddenly you realise that you’ve spent nearly the whole sit going over what your boss did you recently. Pop! You’re out and present. Right then, come into the body, and feel the vibrations of what you’ve been doing. Appreciate the actuality of this, the past echoing in the present body.
There was a kind of protest movement in the sixties, called the human be-in. As often as you can, be in your experience. Make your protest against the mindless consensus culture, and dwell in the whole of your experience, just as it is in this moment. Label the activity, the human being. One function of mindfulness is to remember to do that, as often as possible.
These are experiments in consciousness – which it is good to carry lightly, of course. Zealous for wakefulness is good, but don’t be over-zealous. The tension in your body will be a good warning light where this is concerned. Experiment, and experiment, and experiment. You are responsible for your wakefulness.
Tomorrow, I’ll give you some more ideas for mindfully experimenting with consciousness.