This talk was given at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre in 2016
In the Pali Canon there is a sutta devoted to the topic of mindfulness – the Satipatthana Sutta. The theme of the Satipatthana sutta is mindfulness of oneself – body and its movements, feelings,emotions and thoughts and reality. This is pretty comprehensive and it covers two of the four dimensions of awareness that Bhante Sangharakshita teaches us. Bhante draws together traditional teachings from different sources for a completely comprehensive teaching on the practice of mindfulness and that teaching is laid out as the four dimensions of awareness.
The term mindfulness is widely used in our culture today and a limited practice of mindfulness has been widely disseminated – much of it arising out of the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 and used what he had learned from Buddhist teachers, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, to help people suffering from pain. According to his Wikipedia entry “he adapted the Buddhist teachings on mindfulness and developed the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program. He subsequently renamed the structured eight-week course Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). He removed the Buddhist framework and any connection between mindfulness and Buddhism, instead putting MBSR in a scientific context. The popular practice of mindfulness arises out of a fusion of Buddhist teachings with medical science. Mindfulness in this sense has been helpful to many many people – but this is not what I'm talking about. This talk is about mindfulness in the context of Buddhist spiritual practice.
First things first, what is the English word ‘mindfulness’ translating and is it the best translation? Usually mindfulness is used to translate the term Sati (Pali) or Smriti (Sanskrit). The more literal meaning of the term Sati is memory or recollection. Other Pali terms which are translated by the word mindfulness are Sampajanna and Appamada. Personally I prefer to use the word awareness to translate Sati, because mindfulness has been largely removed from its Buddhist context into a scientific context which I think renders it more palliative than curative. I think it is also useful to remember that Sati means memory or recollection. Sampajanna has been spoken of as meaning 'continuity of purpose' and has the sense of being aware through time – an awareness of past, present and future. Appamada is about keeping up mindful attention in order to guard against unskilful action. This is the more specific Buddhist sense of awareness or mindfulness. It’s an activity you engage in rather than a state you achieve.
The four dimensions of awareness are: awareness of things and environment, awareness of self, awareness of others and awareness of reality. Sati or awareness is not itself a technique or method – it’s a quality of mind which we are trying to cultivate; it’s a state of mind. According to Bhante Sangharakshita it’s “a state of recollection, of undistractedness, of concentration, of continuity and steadfastness of purpose, of continually developing individuality”. All the practices of Buddhism aim to cultivate greater awareness. The Buddha’s last words were – Appamadena sampadetha-with awareness strive on. In other words bring awareness into everything you do.
The
first dimension of awareness is awareness of things, awareness of our
surroundings. This is an aesthetic appreciation of all of nature and
all the objects we encounter. There are two striking examples of what
this could be like – taken from the words of two people in extreme
circumstances. Dennis Potter, the playwright gave an interview when
he was dying of cancer. He said, “We're
the one animal that knows that we're going to die, and yet we carry
on paying our mortgages, doing our jobs, moving about, behaving as
though there's eternity in a sense. And we forget or tend to forget
that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is, and it is
now only. I mean, as much as we would like to call back yesterday and
indeed yearn to, and ache to sometimes, we can't. It's in us, but we
can't actually; it's not there in front of us. However predictable
tomorrow is, and unfortunately for most people, most of the time,
it's too predictable, they're locked into whatever situation they're
locked into ... Even so, no matter how predictable it is, there's the
element of the unpredictable, of the you don't know. The only thing
you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so
vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I'm almost serene. You
know, I can celebrate life.
Below my window in Ross, when I'm working in Ross, for example, there at this season, the blossom is out in full now. It's a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it's white, and looking at it, instead of saying "Oh that's nice blossom" ... last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, and if people could see that, you know. There's no way of telling you; you have to experience it, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it and boy can you celebrate.” (Interview 1994 published as Seeing The Blossom)
Then
there is Brian Keenan who was held in captivity in the Lebanon. In
his book An Evil Cradling he tells the story of his captivity and
solitary confinement often in darkness that his eyes covered. He
wrote, “another
day. I don’t look any more at the food, knowing its monotony will
not change, not even its place on my filthy floor. The door closes,
the padlock rattling, and it’s over again for another day. With
calm, disinterested deliberation I pulled from my head the filthy
towel that blinds me, and slowly turned to go like a dog well-trained
to its corner, to sit again, and wait and wait, forever waiting. I
look at this food I know to be the same as it always has been.
But wait. My eyes are almost burned by what I see. There is a bowl in front of me that wasn’t there before. A brown button bowl and in it some apricots, some small oranges, some nuts, cherries, a banana. The fruits, the colours, mesmerise me in a quiet rapture that spins through my head. I am entranced by colour. I lift an orange into the flat filthy palm of my hand and feel and smell and lick it. The colour orange, the colour, the colour, my God the colour orange. Before me is a feast of colour. I feel myself begin to dance, slowly, I am intoxicated by colour. Such wonder, such absolute wonder in such an insignificant fruit. I cannot, I will not eat this fruit. I sit in quiet joy, so complete, beyond the meaning of joy. My soul finds its completeness in that bowl of colour. The forms of each fruit. The shape and curl and bend all so rich, so perfect. I want to bow before it, loving that blazing, roaring, orange colour... Everything meeting in a moment of colour and form.”
Sometimes on retreat we can experience something like this intensity of awareness of our surroundings, the beauty and perfection of everything is suddenly revealed to us. This is the experience the Buddha is referring to in the famous teaching to Bahia of the Bark Garment (Udana 1:10) – “in the seen, only the seen; in the heard, only the heard; in the sensed only the sensed; in the cognized, only the cognized”.
Usually what we see is our interpretation of our surroundings rather than – in the seen, only the seen. However we cannot force ourselves into the higher state of consciousness which can let go of interpretation, let go of the likes and dislikes. By deliberately practising awareness (Sati) we elevate our consciousness and then we can begin to experience a greater depth and intensity of awareness. This kind of awareness is an aesthetic experience. It is like the experience of an artist. As Bhante Sangharakshita says in Vision and Transformation, “this should be our attitude towards the whole of nature: towards the sun, the moon, the stars, and the Earth; towards trees and flowers and human beings. We should learn to look, learn to see, learn to be aware, and in this way become supremely receptive. Because of our receptivity we shall become one with, or at least fused with, all things; and out of this oneness, this realisation of affinity and deep unity, if we are of artistic temperament we shall create, and truly create.” (Complete Works, Vol.1,p.572)
Another aspect of this first dimension of awareness, awareness of things or of our surroundings, is a sensitivity to the natural resources of the planet. This planet, this mother Earth, needs our awareness and our love more than ever.
The next dimension of awareness is awareness of self. Usually this is broken down into three areas: awareness of body and movement, awareness of feelings and awareness of thoughts. It might be best to say awareness in the body rather than awareness of the body. It is not a matter of taking a stance as if you are outside of your body observing it. It is more about becoming aware of the movements of your body, from within those movements – as if you were a dancer or a gymnast. Initially we need to practice awareness deliberately. To do that we may need to slow down or at least to focus our attention, as we do in walking meditation. Walking meditation is a very good practice for developing a thorough body awareness and it can also lead to a more clear awareness of our feelings and thoughts. In his book Wild Mind, Bodhipaksha says, “as you’re walking along, you can be aware of the emotions you are experiencing. These will almost certainly change throughout the course of a single period of walking meditation. A particular meditator might start off experiencing boredom, becomes slightly irritated as she wonders what this practice is about, start developing curiosity and interest as she begins to notice her body beginning to relax, and then start feeling intensely joyful as the practice becomes more and more fulfilling. Our emotional states often change very rapidly.” (p.145)
Awareness of the body includes both an awareness of our movements and an awareness of the internal dimension of our body – the flow of blood, the pumping of the heart, the flow of air, the filling of the lungs, the digestion of food, the intricate interplay of organs and wonder and fragility of it all.
Awareness of feelings is firstly about noticing whether whatever we are experiencing is pleasant or painful and bland. Feelings here translates the term vedana – which is usually thought of as sensations, such as the sensation of touch – the feeling of a breeze on your skin, the feeling of your bare feet on a cold floor, the feeling of a headache. However our responses to feelings are so instantaneous that awareness of feelings needs to include awareness of emotions. Usually it is easier for us to become aware of our emotional state and then from that we become aware of the sensations or sense experience that give rise to the emotions and we may also be able to become aware of the thoughts, the elaborations and stories that arise out of the emotions. Our emotions can be seen as arising out of sense experience and giving rise to thoughts and interpretations and stories. It is clear then that it's important to be aware of our emotional states and not to confuse our emotions with reality or truth.
There are two basic tendencies in our emotional life – towards or away from, attraction or aversion. Attraction or aversion in relation to things, places, people, ourselves and the whole of life. And that attraction or aversion manifests in lots of emotions of varying degrees of strength. Emotions like irritation, impatience, anger, craving, lust, greed, sadness, happiness, joy, depression, disappointment. We can become aware of our emotions without having to label them precisely – perhaps it sufficient to see whether it’s a movement towards or a movement away from, attraction or aversion. Someone also characterised our emotions as either sad, mad, bad or glad – which might be a useful aid to awareness.
Awareness of thoughts involves being aware of what we are thinking and whether our thinking is directed or undirected. In other words are we thinking about something or are our thoughts just drifting. It involves being aware of the stories we are telling ourselves. It is possible for us to think ourselves into a good or bad mental state and mental states can lead to words and actions and as we all know actions have consequences. The more aware we are of our thoughts and the direction of our thoughts the more choice we have to change our mind and change our behaviour.
In the end the whole point of awareness from a Buddhist perspective is transformation – the transformation of unskilful mental states into skilful mental states, the transformation of a distracted and dissipated individual into an integrated and steadfast person. So awareness always has an ethical dimension, it is always permeated by awareness of karma. This is the key difference between, so-called, secular mindfulness and sati as taught by the Buddha. Of course, awareness as taught by the Buddha in the Satipatthana sutta for instance, has a much wider scope than secular awareness too.
That brings us to the other two dimensions of awareness - awareness of others and awareness of reality. Awareness of others means taking the awareness we have applied to ourselves and imaginatively applying it to those around us. We cannot always be aware of what others are thinking or feeling but we can be aware that they are thinking, they are feeling, they do have emotions. We can be aware that they are a person not an object. They exist in their own right – independent of us and independent of our views about them. Sometimes in close relationships, the partners in a couple or parents and children – it is very difficult to have this awareness of the other person as a person, rather than as my partner or my son or my daughter or my mother or my father. Each person is a universe in themselves but often we can only see the part of them that is illuminated by the rather dim and shaky light of our own awareness.
To properly practice Buddhist ethics we need to have awareness of others. To be kind we need to know what others would experience as a kindness. Otherwise we might be like the Boy Scout in the story – when asked what good deed he had done that week he said he had helped an old lady to cross the road and the scoutmaster said “but that’s not much of a good deed,that is very easy”. “oh no” said the boy “it wasn’t easy at all, she didn’t want to cross to road”. We need awareness of others to be generous and to give appropriately. We can improve our awareness of others by practising the Metta Bhavana, by learning to listen carefully and by seeing them in different situations.
In the Anguttara Nikaya there is a Sutta about how to know another person and the Buddha says you need four things in order to really know another person. This is what it says, “four facts about a person, O monks, can be known from four circumstances. What are these four? By living together with a person his virtue can be known, and this too only after a long time, not casually; by close attention, not without attention; by one who is wise, not by one who is stupid.
Now we come to awareness of reality. There are many ways we could talk about reality but I think the first thing we need to understand is that reality is not a thing out there; it’s not something separate from us, not something separate from our experience. As Bhante puts it, “reality is a breadth of perspective. One can be aware of reality through the other dimensions of awareness.” In our awareness of things, the environment, ourselves and others we can experience awareness of reality.
We can look at the nature of reality from the perspective of the limitations of the mundane state or from the perspective of the perfection of the awakened state. Reality is reality whether we are deluded or awakened. When we are deluded we want to grasp and cling on to things and experiences. We want to get satisfaction from possessing and clinging on to things, people and experiences. We want our house and our money and our relationship to give us security. We want love to last forever, we want to be healthy always and so on. To bring home to us our deluded state the Buddha characterises our experience of ourselves and the world as unsatisfactory, impermanent and insubstantial. Our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions and our dreams– all are ultimately fleeting and can’t give lasting satisfaction because we are trying to grasp and hold on to them.
On the other hand if we can allow the world and our experience of it to be what it is without grasping and clinging to it we experience equanimity, aesthetic appreciation and lasting contentment. The tradition talks about the doors of liberation – vimoksha mukhas – apranihita,the unbiased; animitta, the imageless and shunyata,the void. When we see clearly that there can be no permanent lasting satisfaction or security from grasping and clinging to things, people, or experiences then we can reach a state of equanimity where there is no tendency towards craving or aversion this is what the state of apranihita, the unbiased, means. There is no bias towards or away from whatever comes into awareness.
When we understand deeply the impermanent nature of things, people and experiences then we reach the stage called animitta,the imageless or signless. Everything is in a constant state of flux, and absolutely continuous flow. It is not the case that there are existing substantial things that then change into something else or cease to exist – no, there is just flow, flux, change all the time. All ideas and concepts about existence and non-existence are transcended in the state called the imageless. This is not just a state of not grasping or clinging, it is the deep realisation that there is nothing to grasp,nothing to cling to, and it is a state of deep contentment and aesthetic appreciation.
When we realise deeply that mundane security is impossible to achieve and life flows on in a continuous ungraspable beauty, we also see clearly that there is no fixed, separate, permanent, essential nature in anything including ourselves. Everything is empty of essence, of permanence, of fixedness and separateness. This is the state of shunyata, the void. This is the rich state of the realisation of the interdependent flow of conditions that constitutes the nature of the reality that we are part of.
Our task is to grasp this first intellectually, then secondly,imaginatively and finally, experientially. We need to try to understand and penetrate deeply into what is meant by unsatisfactoriness and the unbiased state of equanimity, what is meant by impermanence and the very liberating and beautiful state of animitta, the imageless, free from the limitation of ideas and concepts. And we need to understand the idea of the void, emptiness and interdependence.
In trying to understand these ideas, these concepts, as we go deeper we will find that the imagination has to come into play and we have to make a leap from logical thought to intuitive imagery. And while we are engaged in this way – we need to be open to allowing our experience and the way we live our lives to be affected and transformed by our reflections and deepening realisation.
This is what awareness of reality is about; it is about transformation – total transformation of our views of ourselves, the world, and other people. Here is how Bhante puts it, “it is not always understood that wisdom, the experience of reality, is destructive. It is tempting to think of it as a pleasant extra, something comfortably added on to what we already are. But it isn’t like that at all. The experience of reality in what the Tantras call its ‘nakedness’ can be a shattering experience. One can even go so far as to say that any shattering experience has an element of reality in it. If an experience shatters, it is real – and if it doesn’t shatter us, it’s authenticity may be questioned. This is not to say that this experience of breaking through or shattering needs to be traumatic – it can be very joyful. Whether one can expect to have this kind of experience oneself all depends on the way one goes about one's spiritual practice. If you meditate for half an hour or an hour a day over a period of years, you will get results, but they will be slow in coming. However, if you meditate for 10 or 20 hours a day, and keep that up, you can expect something much more dramatic to happen. Breaking through depends not so much on the kind of meditation you do as on the intensity with which you do it. And of course most people tend to take things quite easily. There is certainly room for a great deal more intensity in the spiritual practice of most western Buddhists.” (Complete Works, Vol.13, p.171) All four dimensions of awareness can be practised with more intensity and the more we practice awareness, the more fulfilling will be our lives and the happier we will be.
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