The Ingredients of Mindfulness

I know this is a long one but its worth it, I hope.

It seems a lot of people have a problem defining mindfulness.

In order to talk about mindfulness we have to think about our theory of consciousness and the problems of communicating about it. What is consciousness is a great question but beyond the scope of this meditation because it is an emergent property of biological entities and to explain what these terms mean would be a book in itself. It is possible to talk about the functions and processes of something without having to define it. For instance we used and understood how water operates without knowing what made it up for thousands of years. So we will be talking about the qualities and attributes of consciousness, its states and phases. It is part of developing a language and understanding for increasing our depth and maturity as people. We will be comparing and contrasting mindfulness with the different phases of sleep and qualities of wakefulness such as meditation, contemplation, heightened states caused by stress and desire, coma and the everyday flow of attention. Then there is the way our sense of self flows as the states change. But, there are some dangers we should be careful about.

The first danger is getting so abstract or dissociated that we talk about it as an object or substance apart from the real experience of our everyday feelings and states, our real relationships with real people. Although this kind of exercise definitely goes in that direction I am going to keep it to practical terms. Some people would move into descriptive metaphors that are not really relevant to your day to day experience of your self. This can be escapist intellectualism.

Another problem is covered by a relevant saying in Zen which goes something like “be careful not to focus on the finger pointing at the moon”. Metaphors and analogies are our fingers pointing at the moon of consciousness. Consciousness is such an intimate experience, the most intimate in fact, that talking about it means using metaphors. They let us try to describe to another something that feels unique and personal whose experience is different because they are sitting on their seat, not yours. It can feel like we are trying to explain how something works to someone who has never seen it before. Ultimately they have not seen us because we exist in history travelling from past to future and back, and from inside to outside and also back. So we try to encapsulate who we are in the languages of all the senses, touch, words and actions, which also live in our individual histories whilst remaining alone in your skin within the limitations of the moment.

It might be better to say that we are talking about your poetics of consciousness rather than theory, because we use the processes of poetry like associations and correspondences, metaphor, analogy and simile, rather the linear cause and effect of scientific logic. That is where many people’s ideas of karma and reincarnation fall down, because the Universe is not so simply as to say that history, values, morality and ethics work the same way as we imagine physical systems work with one cause leading to mappable effects. For example one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. Intention defines action not just in law but in spirit as well but intention is usually complicate. Simple lines of thought don’t stand up if you are willing to face nature fair and square. Otherwise we could arbitrarily say that all carnivores are evil or vice versa.

Every metaphor has its limitations and its effects on our perspectives. Quite often insight comes when we find a comfortable image that allows us a new point of view on a situation. Since we are social animals and metaphors are obviously part of communication they have social gravity and can have powerful influences in psychology, culture and politics, not to mention economics. Two quick examples – the machine and energy.

The machine is a metaphor first used in the 17^th century by many people across Europe including Newton. They admired the new fan-dangled mechanical clocks that had such neat, clean and precise actions and solved so many problems for people communicating. They were aware of losing the beautifully symmetrical hierarchies of the Christian world where they romanticized the same kind of tidiness – various levels of heavens and hells - in the previous two hundred years. The advent of Protestantism and the developing science of “natural philosophy”, as physics was called, had made Europe and the cosmos a mess of conflicting humanity rather than a centralised God inspired system. To put it back together they imagined a universe that ran like clock work at first God was still the clockmaker but over time laws replaced Him. This image took over. It was comfortable for the intellectuals and we are still living with it through such ideas as the brain as a computer. It has been useful to some extent but has also led to such strange depersonalising ideas as organising corporations, factories, and workshops for efficiency by treating people as cogs in machines.

The use of ‘energy’ as a component of consciousness is interesting. It started as “animal magnetism” in the late 18^th, early 19^th centuries based on a particular experience you can have between your hands or around your body that feels like when you are holding two magnets that are either attracting or repelling each other. As science developed the understanding that electricity was the source of magnetism the image moved to it in the later in the 19^th century. In the early 20^th century with Einstein and others energy became the essence and in the mid to later century people started talking about quantum mechanics and consciousness. As a metaphor these images serve a purpose to help point to the abstraction of our experience into what we call consciousness. It problem is that intellectual escapism previously mentioned, rather passionately and poetically experiencing feeling from the inside out we can dissociate from them and talk about “energy” as an abstraction separate from ourselves. There will be people threatened by this approach because they need the security of thinking their theory reflects reality, this poetic thinking is too relativistic.

Status also plays a role. The use of scientific metaphors has a secondary role beyond the insights they provide, that is a part of every educational and social use of them. Science is the primary source of knowledge in the Western world it legitimates ideas through not just its processes of testing but also, if you’ve studied its history and philosophy, through its politics. And in the spiritual path this cultural element has a role too. Our teachers and leaders seek legitimacy for their knowledge by aligning it with and seeking justifications from science’s position in culture (rather than through its processes).

Talking about consciousness is really talking about us, about the simple direct experience of your life as it is now as you read this in your particular moment of history. It is the source of our perspectives. The way we understand consciousness sets up our view of life because at base it is our understanding of our values and self. Underlying any conversation about feelings and experiences is an understanding of the self expressing attitudes and values which organise our relationship with the world. We live it but rarely speak directly about it. Its nature has an element of unfolding mystery and lost history, and therefore lost causations, which are always present. It can be that what seems logical and shareable to yourself is not always accessible to outsiders without your history.

If we want to try to approach consciousness directly let’s start with signs we all experience in some way, abilities such as: memory, choice, external to internal awareness, physical awareness (that is proprioception our sense of shape and movement), sensory awareness and imagination. In different states we have different intensities of each of these. Others will have their own ingredients they feel are missing from this list and some they do not believe should be included.

Is it reasonable to try to fit all the different states of experience onto a single spectrum? After all it is one mind expressed as different people. This is another danger because whether true or not this attitude can lead to disrespecting the unique perspectives each of us have. It is a form of violence to try to tie the world up in a single ribbon of understanding. This is the source of the ideological battles between religions and political systems who believe theirs is the one truth. It is the flaw in any attempt to make a theory of everything whether scientific, religious, spiritual or secular. However if we are careful and respectful in the way we approach consciousness we can use the knowledge offered to deepen our experience in a positive way (see even the spectrum we use for expressing our attitudes to different emotions and experiences is a scientific metaphor so imbedded we find it hard not to use it even though it suggests a digital attitude to the value of emotions. “Positive” and “negative” originate from the aforementioned studies of electricity 150 years ago).

Coma, sleep, meditation, everyday wakefulness, special heightened waking states (caused by intense stress and desire) – this is a progression that makes sense but yet is easily challenged because consciousness is nonlinear. On the surface this progression is based on the capacity for choice in relation to your body although meditation’s place will cause some controversy because it can be active or passive. And mindfulness, where does it fit? The capacity to connect and communicate with other people is one spectrum to use for measuring the qualities of consciousness as it interacts with bodily sensation and action. It would be shaped like a hill with the peak in the everyday wakefulness phase with the Coma end and heightened states ends both dropping off.

There are experiences which are much harder to fit on these spectra. Dissociative states where you feel conscious yet disconnected from your body whilst having varying capacities for making choice; coma seems to be in its own category too though the research is still unclear. All do not fit comfortably.

Awareness appears here a few times so we need to talk about it. Awareness is simpler than mindfulness because most people assume it means being awake; something everyone has a definition for, often in contrast to sleep or some other states apparently lacking it, like coma. Meditation at base is the execution of a technique and so has external metaphors that are comforting and in the last thirty to forty years is considered in the West to be akin to relaxation, because it is its most obvious measurable and useful side effect.

For those who practice meditation in a deeper way, especially in the West, it is like wakeful sleeping. It takes you to a kind of nether land between waking and sleeping because the aim is usually release from physical sensation without losing consciousness. The result is you slip sideways to a very different experience free of the limited feelings of your body. You develop focus to such an extent the object of concentration takes over your whole mind and you forget external experience, in fact you forget everything but the sensually imagined focal point – a sound (Mantra), a visual (Yantra), there are techniques using smell, taste and feeling or some combinations making multi-sensory techniques. This experience is different to both sleep and wakefulness yet has ingredients of both. The two can get confused as well because people talk about meditation in terms of different qualities.

Awareness can be deep or broad at one end through to superficial. Sometimes these categories are the product of social attitudes involving status play. Meaning that someone who agrees with you is very aware and someone who disagrees is superficial or lacking awareness. It is often a way of avoiding saying the person is stupid or has stupid attitudes or lazy or crazy and be part of conflict avoidance through condescension. Sleep also has phases and depths, light and deep, dreaming or not, lucid and ordinary often measured by your awareness and the intensity of imagination during it.

If we put coma and sleep at one end of the spectrum of consciousness, because of its relationship with the body - meaning that whatever awareness you might have of the external, your body is outside choice. Then put meditation because it is a wilful choice to release awareness of your body followed by everyday awareness, though some will put meditation on the heightened side of the spectrum. I put stationary meditation in this position because of the way the Westerners do it lying down or in a comfortable chair. In the East it is done in a different way - sitting up or standing so that it is more active. Then comes the heighten states that come with stress or excitement to the point where again you lose awareness of your body because your consciousness is so focussed externally that although your body is effected by your decisions sensual awareness takes a back seat to the sensuality of action.

Contemplation is different again from meditation it seems. Where meditation, as mentioned is a sacred exercise involving focussing on specific objects of mind (some will say spirit) contemplation focuses on the processes of mind/spirit. Although the word is sometimes used to mean ‘consider’, as a discipline it is the most common translation for the Buddhism disciplines of “djana” or “dyana”, and of the Chinese character “Ch’an” (old spelling) which in Japanese is pronounced “Zen”. In these disciplines you are given an object of mind (a Koan) to contemplate but unlike in meditation your master challenges you about the insights you are gaining. The answers are not verbal, linear, or sensible in the way your teacher at school would think. They are tests of your spontaneity, your freedom from history. You are asked to achieve the focus of meditation whilst maintaining awareness of your body and the outside. This is what is translated as mindfulness.

Walking and other active meditations are the other starting points for talking about mindfulness because they are also parts of the training for it. They use as objects of focus an action which asks that you be aware of your surroundings whilst achieving the intensity of focus achieved in meditation and the heightened awareness of stress and desire. It is why the Chinese, the Japanese and the Tantrikas use wrestling and other martial arts as part of their training for it.

Let’s start from the everyday experience of mindfulness. When we say ‘to be mindful’ it means to be extra attentive to the possibility of danger so it is a wilful choice to heighten awareness. For most people this is achieved by tensing, by getting stressed about the situation, they lose their sense of the choices being made. In martial training the aim is to achieve that heighten awareness with a relaxation and self comfort based on strength and self-knowledge. In Tantra it is desire and passion that is the metaphor for this balanced intense aliveness.

The heightened states that are the natural results of intense danger and passionate desire generally involve the feeling of being overpowered by your emotions because something from the outside has reached in and given you a very real external focal point. If it is possible to say that meditation is when daylight consciousness in which we normally live marries the night time consciousness of sleep then mindfulness maybe a state that marries that everyday state of consciousness with the heightened states of stress and desire.

In these heightened states we are usually not aware of our inner life. The focus is on the external and as a result we hear stories of people doing all kinds of miraculous things because they overlook the limitations that normally restrict them. Meditation and contemplation are focussed on the experience of life inside your skin. Both are connected to your culture because the meditation exercises are usually taught along with meanings that have a whole cosmology to them, a background which is part of their power. Even Transcendental Meditation where they do not teach you the meaning of the particular mantra is still couched in goals and possibilities and meanings for your psyche of the practice.

Contemplation is not analytical in the logical way of science as we described above, but nonetheless it is a process of breaking down consciousness experientially to get beyond culture and language to the deep sources of your experience what Zen calls the “essence of mind”. Mindfulness is building a bridge between these two aspects of consciousness broadening the experience of wakefulness to incorporate the moment in all its meanings internal and external, cultural and sensory. Even here the simile of the bridge is inadequate because you probably focus on the bridge and forgot that it needs supports and entry points on each river bank, or maybe it’s across a freeway full of cars. In that sense it is transcendent because it transforms our relationship with our sense of self, our cultural context and the body, that is the seat of the uniqueness best demonstrated by the fact that we have one set of eyes looking at a point and integrated in our experience as a singular point of view.