It certainly makes a lot of sense, that close attention to the dynamics of your immediate, conscious experience, sustained over years, will give significant insight into how you are organised. This insight can go all the way to intimately understanding what it means to be an ‘organism’ at all. The Nikāya Buddha’s interest is in taking mindful awareness as far as a human can go, into what he speaks of as ‘the heartwood.’
In the way I understand the Mindfulness Sutta, mindful experience is bodily-based experience. It includes our sense of bodily form; and, (bear with me while I introduce yet another term) the hedonic values in our bodily sensations and our mind-states. (That is, are they pleasant, unpleasant, or neither?)
And, the third kind of basic content (the data, so to speak) of our dynamic organismic life is: our states of mind – our mood and intentions. There you have the first three areas of mindful attention.
The fourth placement of mindful attention has to do with the patterns or principles of the dynamics of those first three; including how mindful practice can transform these dynamics – a transformation which can be conceptualised as ‘from sentient being to Buddha.’
What’s interesting about reading the Mindfulness Sutta is that it is mostly about naming what you will find when you become attuned to the mind’s functioning, including the patterns of internal interaction which we will discover as we continue our exploration.
The question of the ‘how’ of attention is mostly addressed by the graded process of making acquaintance with your experience. You calm the ‘body’ first, through attention to the form and breath. You generate a motivation to go deep, by contemplating the certainty of death. Along the way you are attuning to the fluxional nature of all experience. With concentrated attention, the body calms further.
As a result the level of experience which we call ‘mind’ is naturally more stably accessible. Acquaintance with ‘mind states’ brings further calm, dropping us into a subtler level again of mind-experience. That is, you calm the mind, and the subtle interplay of body, hedonic value, and mental-emotional states can come into view. This combined with the awareness of flux (continuous occurring) is very powerful for insight into the deepest reaches of human consciousness.
All of this is a process of refinement of awareness. However, the matter of the precise ‘how’ of knowing, rather than the matter of ‘on what’ attention can alight, this can be empowered, further.
It seems to me that the Mindfulness Sutta mostly brings into view ‘what’ will need your attention in the process of self-realisation. My experience of Buddhist practice is that the fine-grained ‘how’ is a matter of trial and error, because the experiential texture of the actual knowing only comes with repeated present-moment bodily-felt exploration. It takes a long time if you are doing this on your own; and, it’s much easier with a trusted guide, should you find one.
In a sense no-one can teach you the ‘how’ of attention. By its nature, you’re on your own. Nevertheless, it seems to me, that what Gendlin says about Western philosophers can be applied here, in the matter of discovering how to be mindful at the direct experiential level.
I’ll put it as I understand this point. The great philosophers present the profound outcomes of their exploration, but you won’t find in their works a description of the subtle experiential process whereby they came to their philosophical concepts. They can present the logical steps, where logical steps occurred.
However, they haven’t been able to describe the activation of insight itself – that which we call wisdom. How does knowledge happen? This subtle inner process is usually not explicated by them. Gendlin has made this the subject of his book Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning.
The Nikāya Buddha is more helpful than the Western tradition, in the sense that he gives us instructions in meditation and mindfulness, which he says – if applied consistently with goodwill, diligence and sincerity – will verify his insights for the practitioner. This is helpful – to have some method.
Yet, there is one more skill which is helpful; and which I have found emerges in live interviews with teachers on retreat, but which is not conveyed in the texts. On retreat, when two people – teacher and student – inquire together, they unwittingly activate the felt nature of looking into present-moment experiencing. Wisdom is a felt process. Some teachers know this, and direct their students toward the bodily apprehension of truth.
To this end, modern mindfulness-based spiritual practitioners have a powerful concept at their disposal – that of ‘bodily-felt meaning.’ We know there are the bodily-based practices, as articulated by the Nikāya Buddha in many suttas. And, there is also, once the meditation and mindfulness has been activated, the possibility of working more explicitly with ‘felt meaning.’
Note that I’m not saying felt meaning has not been there for either the Western philosophers or the Eastern meditators. Surely it has. And, I repeat that it works in personal interaction between teacher and student. However, we can empower this dimension further by naming it, developing it, inviting it into our explorations, and developing skills in relation to it.
We can borrow straight from Gendlin’s ground-breaking Focusing work, and apply it in our mindfulness practice.