Dharma Leadership - Right Mindfulness

Dharma leadership - right mindfulness

Last week I taught a class on Right Mindfulness, or "Sati", to my youth class. Right Mindfulness is the seventh of the eightfold path to enlightenment. One translation of the concept into English is "bare attention", although that only captures one facet of mindfulness. In essence, the goal of one seeking mindfulness is to avoid letting the mind embellish the senses, in an effort to get at the "real" world of physical sensation. I will quote from The Noble Eightfold Path by Bhikku Bodhi: "All judgements and interpretations, if they occur, should be just registered and dropped."

One analogy that works well for me in understanding this concept is that of a "diagnostic" mode, like as for cars or computers. Understanding the raw sensations of the world is key to understanding our emotions, embellishments and ultimately our suffering, in the same way that knowledge of mechanical phenomena helps us fix our car, or knowing how to diagnose a computer virus can cure our desktop. Some of us, for example, may know nothing about cars; they are merely boxes which get us from Point a to b. And this works well, until something goes wrong. If we know nothing about cars, then we are at the mercy of a skilled mechanic (or worse). If he tells us that the problem with our turn signals is in the catalytic converter, we have no choice but to nod our heads and go along. But if we understand cars, then we have a chance of not only fixing the problem ourselves, but in understanding the advice of others. Similarly, if we know nothing about mindfulness, then when our mind tells us that we are upset or angry, we have no choice but to take its word for it. Of course in daily life we may not wish to constantly examine our emotions and thoughts any more than we wish to examine the inside of our car, but when it becomes critical, we must have already laid the foundation for mindfulness; "exercised" our mindfulness "muscle". Just as the wrong time to learn to change a tire is by the highway, so too the wrong time to understand our minds is when we are upset, or overly exuberant.

When we are mindful, we choose to see the world as it truly is. We experience sense phenomenon without embellishment. This is very hard. The mind wishes dearly to jump to interpretations and conclusions. I will quote again: "the mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly. Immediately after grasping, it launches on a course of ideation...[it] posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs...in the end the original direct experience has been overrun.".

It does not ring true to me that these concepts and constructs are not real, as some would say. Instead, I find that they are real, but they obey different laws than direct experience, and they cannot be confused with direct experience. To lump our thoughts together with our experience is profoundly misleading. It leads us to act as if they were solid and physical, when they are not. They are a guide, like the filing system at the library. They make sense, but we must be able to discard them. Becoming obsessed with them is like being obsessed with the call numbers on a book and never cracking the cover. I now quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama:

For all anxiety and fear,
And pain in boundless quantity,
Their source and wellspring is the mind itself,
As He who spoke the truth declared.

He continues: "one may, of course, have some vague wish to attain enlightenment, or feel it is something one ought to attain. But without having the certainty that enlightenment exists and is accessible, one will never accomplish it. It is therefore very important to know what enlightenment means...all phenomena are by nature empty, devoid of true existence...but what is our perception? What we experience is just the opposite...we see everything as existent and real...we have been ignorantly clinging to our mistaken way of seeing things. Moreover, this ignorance has been the root of desire and hatred. Ignorance, the belief that things are real, is extremely powerful. But we should remember that it is nothing more than a mistake...it's opposite is based on a consistent truth that stands up to all argument."

And so, I encourage you to add mindfulness to your bag of tricks, just like carrying a spare tire in your car. You may not need it right now, but when you do you'll be very glad you have it!!