“Mindfulness” is the English transla­tion of the Pali word sati. Sati is an activity. What ex­actly is that? There can be no precise answer, at least not in words. Words are devised by the symbolic levels of the mind, and they describe those realities with which symbolic thinking deals. Mindfulness is pre-symbolic. It is not shackled to logic. Nevertheless, mindfulness can be experienced—rather easily—and it can be de­scribed, as long as you keep in mind that the words are only fingers pointing at the moon. They are not the thing itself. The actual experi­ence lies beyond the words and above the symbols. Mindfulness could be described in completely different terms than will be used here, and each description could still be correct.

Mindfulness is a subtle process that you are using at this very moment. The fact that this process lies above and beyond words does not make it unreal—quite the reverse. Mindfulness is the reality that gives rise to words; the words that follow are simply pale shadows of reality. So, it is important to understand that everything that fol­lows here is analogy. It is not going to make perfect sense. It will always remain beyond verbal logic. But you can experience it. The meditation technique called vipassana (insight) that was introduced by the Buddha about twenty-five centuries ago is a set of mental activities specifically aimed at experiencing a state of uninterrupted mindfulness.

When you first become aware of something, there is a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it. That is a state of awareness. Ordinarily, this state is short-lived. It is that flashing split second just as you focus your eyes on the thing, just as you focus your mind on the thing, just before you objectify it, clamp down on it mentally, and segregate it from the rest of existence. It takes place just before you start thinking about it—before your mind says, “Oh, it’s a dog.” That flowing, soft-focused moment of pure awareness is mindfulness. In that brief flashing mind-moment you experience a thing as an un-thing. You experience a softly flowing moment of pure experience that is inter­locked with the rest of reality, not separate from it. Mindfulness is very much like what you see with your peripheral vision as opposed to the hard focus of normal or central vision. Yet this moment of soft, unfocused awareness contains a very deep sort of knowing that is lost as soon as you focus your mind and objectify the object into a thing. In the process of ordinary perception, the mindfulness step is so fleeting as to be unobservable. We have developed the habit of squandering our attention on all the remaining steps, focusing on the perception, cognizing the perception, labeling it, and most of all, getting involved in a long string of symbolic thought about it. That original moment of mindfulness is rapidly passed over. It is the pur­pose of vipassana meditation to train us to prolong that moment of awareness.

When this mindfulness is prolonged by using proper techniques, you find that this experience is profound, and it changes your entire view of the universe. This state of perception has to be learned, how­ever, and it takes regular practice. Once you learn the technique, you will find that mindfulness has many interesting aspects.

Mindfulness is mirror-thought. It reflects only what is presently hap­pening and in exactly the way it is happening. There are no biases.

Mindfulness is nonjudgmental observation. It is that ability of the mind to observe without criticism. With this ability, one sees things without condemnation or judgment. One is surprised by nothing. One simply takes a balanced interest in things exactly as they are in their natural states. One does not decide and does not judge. One just observes. Please note that when we say, “One does not decide and does not judge,” what we mean is that the meditator observes experiences very much like a scientist observing an object under a microscope without any preconceived notions, only to see the object exactly as it is. In the same way, the meditator notices imperma­nence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness.

It is psychologically impossible for us to objectively observe what is going on within us if we do not at the same time accept the occur­rence of our various states of mind. This is especially true with un­pleasant states of mind. In order to observe our own fear, we must accept the fact that we are afraid. We can’t examine our own depres­sion without accepting it fully. The same is true for irritation and agitation, frustration, and all those other uncomfortable emotional states. You can’t examine something fully if you are busy rejecting its existence. Whatever experience we may be having, mindfulness just accepts it. It is simply another of life’s occurrences, just another thing to be aware of. No pride, no shame, nothing personal at stake—what is there, is there.

Mindfulness is an impartial watchfulness. It does not take sides. It does not get hung up in what is perceived. It just perceives. Mind­fulness does not get infatuated with the good mental states. It does not try to sidestep the bad mental states. There is no clinging to the pleasant, no fleeing from the unpleasant. Mindfulness treats all expe­riences equally, all thoughts equally, all feelings equally. Nothing is suppressed. Nothing is repressed. Mindfulness does not play favorites.

Mindfulness is nonconceptual awareness. Another English term for sati is “bare attention.” It is not thinking. It does not get involved with thought or concepts. It does not get hung up on ideas or opin­ions or memories. It just looks. Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them. It does not label them or categorize them. It just observes everything as if it were occurring for the first time. It is not analysis, which is based on reflection and memory. It is, rather, the direct and immediate experiencing of whatever is happening, without the medium of thought. It comes before thought in the perceptual process.

Mindfulness is present-time awareness. It takes place in the here and now. It is the observance of what is happening right now, in the present moment. It stays forever in the present, perpetually on the crest of the ongoing wave of passing time. If you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is memory. When you then become aware that you are remembering your second-grade teacher, that is mindfulness. If you then conceptualize the process and say to your­self, “Oh, I am remembering,” that is thinking.

Mindfulness is non-egotistic alertness. It takes place without ref­erence to self. With mindfulness one sees all phenomena without references to concepts like “me,” “my,” or “mine.” For example, suppose there is pain in your left leg. Ordinary consciousness would say, “I have a pain.” Using mindfulness, one would simply note the sensation as a sensation. One would not tack on that extra concept “I.” Mindfulness stops one from adding anything to perception, or subtracting anything from it. One does not enhance anything. One does not emphasize anything. One just observes exactly what is there without distortion.

Mindfulness is awareness of change. It is observing the passing flow of experience. It is watching things as they are changing. It is seeing the birth, growth, and maturity of all phenomena. It is watch­ing phenomena decay and die. Mindfulness is watching things moment by moment, continuously. It is observing all phenomena— physical, mental, or emotional—whatever is presently taking place in the mind. One just sits back and watches the show. Mindfulness is the observance of the basic nature of each passing phenomenon. It is watching the thing arising and passing away. It is seeing how that thing makes us feel and how we react to it. It is observing how it affects others. In mindfulness, one is an unbiased observer whose sole job is to keep track of the constantly passing show of the uni­verse within. Please note that last point. In mindfulness, one watches the universe within. The meditator who is developing mindfulness is not concerned with the external universe. It is there, but in medita­tion one’s field of study is one’s own experience, one’s thoughts, one’s feelings, and one’s perceptions. In meditation, one is one’s own laboratory. The universe within has an enormous fund of informa­tion containing the reflection of the external world and much more. An examination of this material leads to total freedom.

Mindfulness is participatory observation. The meditator is both participant and observer at one and the same time. If one watches one’s emotions or physical sensations, one is feeling them at that very same moment. Mindfulness is not an intellectual awareness. It is just awareness. The mirror-thought metaphor breaks down here. Mindfulness is objective, but it is not cold or unfeeling. It is the wake­ful experience of life, an alert participation in the ongoing process of living. Mindfulness is extremely difficult to define in words—not because it is complex, but because it is too simple and open. The same problem crops up in every area of human experience. The most basic concept is always the most difficult to pin down. Look at a dictionary and you will see a clear example. Long words generally have concise definitions, but for short basic words like the and is, definitions can be a page long. And in physics, the most difficult functions to describe are the most basic—those that deal with the most fundamental realities of quantum mechanics. Mindfulness is a pre-symbolic function. You can play with word symbols all day long and you will never pin it down completely. We can never fully ex­press what it is. However, we can say what it does.

There are three fundamental activities of mindfulness. We can use these activities as functional definitions of the term: (1) mindfulness reminds us of what we are supposed to be doing; (2) it sees things as they really are; and (3) it sees the true nature of all phenomena. Let’s examine these definitions in greater detail.

1. Mindfulness reminds you of what you are supposed to be doing. In meditation, you put your attention on one item. When your mind wanders from this focus, it is mindfulness that reminds you that your mind is wandering and what you are supposed to be doing. It is mindfulness that brings your mind back to the object of medita­tion. All of this occurs instantaneously and without internal dia­logue. Mindfulness is not thinking. Repeated practice in meditation establishes this function as a mental habit, which then carries over into the rest of your life. A serious meditator pays bare attention to occurrences all the time, day in, day out, whether formally sitting in meditation or not. This is a very lofty ideal toward which those who meditate may be working for a period of years or even decades. Our habit of getting stuck in thought is years old, and that habit will hang on in the most tenacious manner. The only way out is to be equally persistent in the cultivation of constant mindfulness. When mindfulness is present, you will notice when you become stuck in your thought patterns. It is that very noticing which allows you to back out of the thought process and free yourself from it. Mindful­ness then returns your attention to its proper focus. If you are medi­tating at that moment, then your focus will be the formal object of meditation. If you are not in formal meditation, it will be just a pure application of bare attention itself, just a pure noticing of whatever comes up without getting involved—“Ah, this comes up . . . and now this, and now this . . . and now this.”

Mindfulness is at one and the same time both bare attention itself and the function of reminding us to pay bare attention if we have ceased to do so. Bare attention is noticing. It reestablishes itself sim­ply by noticing that it has not been present. As soon as you are notic­ing that you have not been noticing, then by definition you are noticing and then you are back again to paying bare attention.

Mindfulness creates its own distinct feeling in consciousness. It has a flavor—a light, clear, energetic flavor. By comparison, con­scious thought is heavy, ponderous, and picky.

But here again, these are just words. Your own practice will show you the difference. Then you will probably come up with your own words, and the words used here will become superfluous. Remem­ber, practice is the thing.

2. Mindfulness sees things as they really are. Mindfulness adds nothing to perception and it subtracts nothing. It distorts nothing. It is bare attention and just looks at whatever comes up. Conscious thought pastes things over our experience, loads us down with con­cepts and ideas, immerses us in a churning vortex of plans and wor­ries, fears and fantasies. When mindful, you don’t play that game. You just notice exactly what arises in the mind, then you notice the next thing. “Ah, this . . . and this . . . and now this.” It is really very simple.

3. Mindfulness sees the true nature of phenomena. Mindfulness and only mindfulness can perceive that the three prime characteristics that Buddhism teaches are the deepest truths of existence. In Pali these three are called anicca (impermanence), dukkha (unsatisfactori­ness), and anatta (selflessness—the absence of a permanent, un­changing entity that we call soul or self). These truths are not presented in Buddhist teaching as dogmas demanding blind faith. The Buddhists feel that these truths are universal and self-evident to anyone who cares to investigate in a proper way. Mindfulness is that method of investigation. Mindfulness alone has the power to reveal the deepest level of reality available to human observation. At this level of inspection, one sees the following: (a) all conditioned things are inherently transitory; (b) every worldly thing is, in the end, unsat­isfying; and (c) there are really no entities that are unchanging or permanent, only processes.

Mindfulness works like an electron microscope. That is, it oper­ates on so fine a level that one can actually directly perceive those realities that are at best theoretical constructs to the conscious thought process. Mindfulness actually sees the impermanent charac­ter of every perception. It sees the transitory and passing nature of everything that is perceived. It also sees the inherently unsatisfactory nature of all conditioned things. It sees that there is no sense grab­bing on to any of these passing shows. Peace and happiness cannot be found that way. And finally, mindfulness sees the inherent selflessness of all phenomena. It sees the way that we have arbitrarily selected a certain bundle of perceptions, chopped them off from the rest of the surging flow of experience, and then conceptualized them as separate, enduring entities. Mindfulness actually sees these things. It does not think about them; it sees them directly.

When it is fully developed, mindfulness sees these three attri­butes of existence directly, instantaneously, and without the inter­vening medium of conscious thought. In fact, even the attributes that we just covered are inherently unified. They don’t really exist as sep­arate items. They are purely the result of our struggle to take this fundamentally simple process called mindfulness and express it in the cumbersome and inadequate thought symbols of the conscious level. Mindfulness is a process, but it does not take place in steps. It is a holistic process that occurs as a unit: you notice your own lack of mindfulness; and that noticing itself is a result of mindfulness; and mindfulness is bare attention; and bare attention is noticing things exactly as they are without distortion; and the way they are is impermanent (anicca), unsatisfactory (dukkha), and selfless (anatta). It all takes place in the space of a few mind-moments. This does not mean, however, that you will instantly attain liberation (freedom from all human weaknesses) as a result of your first moment of mindfulness. Learning to integrate this material into your conscious life is quite another process. And learning to prolong this state of mindfulness is still another. They are joyous processes, however, and they are well worth the effort.

Taken from: http://www.shambhala.com/html/learn/features/buddhism/basics/mindfulness.cfm

Chapter 16 from Mindfulness In Plain English by H. Gunaratana Mahathera

You can expect certain benefits from your meditation. The initial ones are practical, prosaic things; the later stages are profoundly transcendent. They run together from the simple to the sublime. We will set forth some of them here. Your own experience is all that counts.

Those things that we called hindrances or defilements are more than just unpleasant mental habits. They are the primary manifestations of the ego process itself. The ego sense itself is essentially a feeling of separation — a perception of distance between that which we call me, and that which we call other. This perception is held in place only if it is constantly exercised, and the hindrances constitute that exercise.

Greed and lust are attempts to get ’some of that’ for me; hatred and aversion are attempts to place greater distance between ‘me and that’. All the defilements depend upon the perception of a barrier between self and other, and all of them foster this perception every time they are exercised. Mindfulness perceives things deeply and with great clarity. It brings our attention to the root of the defilements and lays bare their mechanism. It sees their fruits and their effects upon us. It cannot be fooled. Once you have clearly seen what greed really is and what it really does to you and to others, you just naturally cease to engage in it. When a child burns his hand on a hot oven, you don’t have to tell him to pull it back; he does it naturally, without conscious thought and without decision. There is a reflex action built into the nervous system for just that purpose, and it works faster than thought. By the time the child perceives the sensation of heat and begins to cry, the hand has already been jerked back from the source of pain. Mindfulness works in very much the same way: it is wordless, spontaneous and utterly efficient. Clear mindfulness inhibits the growth of hindrances; continuous mindfulness extinguishes them. Thus, as genuine mindfulness is built up, the walls of the ego itself are broken down, craving diminishes, defensiveness and rigidity lessen, you become more open, accepting and flexible. You learn to share your loving-kindness.

Traditionally, Buddhists are reluctant to talk about the ultimate nature of human beings. But those who are willing to make descriptive statements at all usually say that our ultimate essence or Buddha nature is pure, holy and inherently good. The only reason that human beings appear otherwise is that their experience of that ultimate essence has been hindered; it has been blocked like water behind a dam. The hindrances are the bricks of which the dam is built. As mindfulness dissolves the bricks, holes are punched in the dam and compassion and sympathetic joy come flooding forward. As meditative mindfulness develops, your whole experience of life changes. Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious, becomes lucid and precise, no longer just an unnoticed background for your preoccupations. It becomes a thing consistently perceived.

Each passing moment stands out as itself; the moments no longer blend together in an unnoticed blur. Nothing is glossed over or taken for granted, no experiences labeled as merely ‘ordinary’. Everything looks bright and special. You refrain from categorizing your experiences into mental pigeonholes. Descriptions and interpretations are chucked aside and each moment of time is allowed to speak for itself. You actually listen to what it has to say, and you listen as if it were being heard for the very first time. When your meditation becomes really powerful, it also becomes constant. You consistently observe with bare attention both the breath and every mental phenomenon. You feel increasingly stable, increasingly moored in the stark and simple experience of moment-to-moment existence.

Once your mind is free from thought, it becomes clearly wakeful and at rest in an utterly simple awareness. This awareness cannot be described adequately. Words are not enough. It can only be experienced. Breath ceases to be just breath; it is no longer limited to the static and familiar concept you once held. You no longer see it as a succession of just inhalations and exhalations; it is no longer some insignificant monotonous experience. Breath becomes a living, changing process, something alive and fascinating. It is no longer something that takes place in time; it is perceived as the present moment itself. Time is seen as a concept, not an experienced reality.

This is simplified, rudimentary awareness which is stripped of all extraneous detail. It is grounded in a living flow of the present, and it is marked by a pronounced sense of reality. You know absolutely that this is real, more real than anything you have ever experienced. Once you have gained this perception with absolute certainty, you have a fresh vantage point, a new criterion against which to gauge all of your experience. After this perception, you see clearly those moments when you are participating in bare phenomena alone, and those moments when you are disturbing phenomena with mental attitudes. You watch yourself twisting reality with mental comments, with stale images and personal opinions. You know what you are doing, when you are doing it. You become increasingly sensitive to the ways in which you miss the true reality, and you gravitate towards the simple objective perspective which does not add to or subtract from what is. You become a very perceptive individual. From this vantage point, all is seen with clarity. The innumerable activities of mind and body stand out in glaring detail. You mindfully observe the incessant rise and fall of breath; you watch an endless stream of bodily sensations and movements; you scan a rapid succession of thoughts and feelings, and you sense the rhythm that echoes from the steady march of time. And in the midst of all this ceaseless movement, there is no watcher, there is only watching.

In this state of perception, nothing remains the same for two consecutive moments. Everything is seen to be in constant transformation. All things are born, all things grow old and die. There are no exceptions. You awaken to the unceasing changes of your own life. You look around and see everything in flux, everything, everything, everything. It is all rising and falling, intensifying and diminishing, coming into existence and passing away. All of life, every bit of it from the infinitesimal to the Indian Ocean, is in motion constantly. You perceive the universe as a great flowing river of experience. Your most cherished possessions are slipping away, and so is your very life. Yet this impermanence is no reason for grief. You stand there transfixed, staring at this incessant activity, and your response is wondrous joy. It’s all moving, dancing and full of life.

As you continue to observe these changes and you see how it all fits together, you become aware of the intimate connectedness of all mental, sensory and affective phenomena. You watch one thought leading to another, you see destruction giving rise to emotional reactions and feelings giving rise to more thoughts. Actions, thoughts, feelings, desires — you see all of them intimately linked together in a delicate fabric of cause and effect. You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall and you see that they never last; you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off; you see yourself fail. It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.

Out of this living laboratory itself comes an inner and unassailable conclusion. You see that your life is marked by disappointment and frustration, and you clearly see the source. These reactions arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have. These are no longer theoretical concepts — you have seen these things for yourself and you know that they are real. You perceive your own fear, your own basic insecurity in the face of life and death. It is a profound tension that goes all the way down to the root of thought and makes all of life a struggle. You watch yourself anxiously groping about, fearfully grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn’t change.

You see the pain of loss and grief, you watch yourself being forced to adjust to painful developments day after day in your own ordinary existence. You witness the tensions and conflicts inherent in the very process of everyday living, and you see how superficial most of your concerns really are. You watch the progress of pain, sickness, old age and death. You learn to marvel that all these horrible things are not fearful at all. They are simply reality.

Through this intensive study of the negative aspects of your existence, you become deeply acquainted with dukkha, the unsatisfactory nature of all existence. You begin to perceive dukkha at all levels of our human life, from the obvious down to the most subtle. You see the way suffering inevitably follows in the wake of clinging, as soon as you grasp anything, pain inevitably follows. Once you become fully acquainted with the whole dynamic of desire, you become sensitized to it. You see where it rises, when it rises and how it affects you. You watch it operate over and over, manifesting through every sense channel, taking control of the mind and making consciousness its slave.

In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place. In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold. You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them, you see them as the very stuff of human thought. You search for that thing you call ‘me’, but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them. You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective and defensive over these pitiful things and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself–physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings and emotions–it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for ‘me’.

You find nothing. In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes which have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.

Your whole view of self changes at this point. You begin to look upon yourself as if you were a newspaper photograph. When viewed with the naked eyes, the photograph you see is a definite image. When viewed through a magnifying glass, it all breaks down into an intricate configuration of dots. Similarly, under the penetrating gaze of mindfulness, the feeling of self, an ‘I’ or ‘being’ anything, loses its solidity and dissolves. There comes a point in insight meditation where the three characteristics of existence–impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and selflessness– come rushing home with concept-searing force. You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no self. You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping and resistance. In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed. The entity of self evaporates. All that is left is an infinity of interrelated non-personal phenomena which are conditioned and ever changing. Craving is extinguished and a great burden is lifted. There remains only an effortless flow, without a trace of resistance or tension. There remains only peace, and blessed Nibbana, the uncreated, is realized.

Taken from: http://ariyavansa.org/sp-home/sp-018/

[Note: the comments in brackets are the editor's.]

The dhamma talk tonight is on the four foundations of mindfulness. ‘Vipassana’ means to develop mindfulness until it becomes insight-knowledge [the realization of impermanence, unsatis- factoriness, and impersonality]. In order to get insight-knowledge you have to observe the four foundations of mindfulness. The foundations are four kinds of objects to put mindfulness on. It’s like a table – all four legs have to be stable before you can put something on the table.

Another example is the foundation of a building. Before constructing this meditation center, for instance, someone had to lay the foundation. They had to use materials like steel and concrete. Whether or not it’s a good foundation depends on whether the builder was smart enough to do the job right.

It’s the same thing with mindfulness. You have to lay the foundation first. The Discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness [Satipatthana Sutta] says that we should use four kinds of material – four objects to lay the foundation for mindfulness. These four objects are: 1) body; 2) feeling; 3) consciousness; and 4) mental objects [the last group includes the five sense-impressions - colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches - which are material in nature]. Only when these four phenomena are known in the present, from moment-to-moment, can they be used as objects of mindfulness. When you develop mindfulness based on these foundations, wisdom will arise.

So these four kinds of objects are used to build wisdom – wisdom, as opposed to the pleasure or happiness that arises from strong concentration [wisdom leads to the supramundane happiness of nibbana. This happiness is more correctly expressed as the complete absence of suffering]. If you don’t have the correct foundation, wisdom can’t appear. It can’t grow.

All of us have the materials to lay the foundation already. I have a body and you have a body. We also have feeling. When you sit too long you have pain. When I sit too long I have pain, too. That’s feeling. Feeling doesn’t belong to anyone [in the ultimate sense, you do not own your feelings because they are not amenable to your control]. Feeling belongs to conditions, to the universe. Everyone has the same materials. Everyone has a body made of the same four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Everyone experiences the same feelings: unpleasant, pleasant and neutral. It doesn’t make any difference who you are.

We all have the same types of consciousness, too. For example, everyone has desire, hatred and delusion in the mind – everyone except arahants [those who have reached the highest level of enlightenment]. They have eliminated all mental defilements. Their minds are already pure, clean, and perfect. But those who aren’t enlightened – laypersons – all have the same impurities in the mind.

All of us experience the same emotions: sadness, anxiety, anger, excitement, confusion and doubt. Since everyone has the same materials, we know that these things belong to the universe, not to a nationality. They don’t belong to Thais or Canadians or Americans. The body belongs to the truth. Feeling belongs to the universe. Consciousness belongs to conditions. Mental objects and emotions belong to cause and effect.

We have to accept the feelings and emotions that arise. That’s the way it is. When you feel sad, anxious, frustrated or happy, don’t attach to that emotion. Don’t think, “I am sad, I am anxious, I am frustrated, I am happy.” [In truth, an emotion is an impersonal phenomenon. And even the consciousness that knows the emotion is impersonal. It isn't a self.]

You don’t have to attach to the things you experience. Just observe them or know them so they become objects of mindfulness. Just watch to see how long they stay.

Usually they don’t last long – they just arise and disappear right away. Sometimes an emotion appears and stays for awhile. After that it passes away. Everything is impermanent. Emotions aren’t permanent at all. Everything is unsatisfactory (dukkha) – meaning, it never stays long. It’s unstable. Everything in the universe is nonself. It doesn’t belong to anyone.

We can’t truly control mind and matter. That’s the truth, all right? We need to see the truth in each of the four kinds of objects of mindfulness. When we observe them in the present moment, then all four objects, body, feeling, consciousness, and mental contents, will be seen as they really are – as impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not belonging to self.

But how do we know what the correct path is? The Buddha taught that since you have a body and mind, those are the path. The tools to practice with are your own body and mind. You have to separate the two. The body and other material phenomena are called ‘rupa.’ Mind is called ‘nama.’

The mind is made up of consciousness and mental factors. Feeling is a mental factor. Feeling is nama. Everyone has rupa and nama, the same material and mental phenomena. The Buddha said that even after he died, all of us would still have rupa and nama, still have a body, feeling, consciousness and mental factors. That means that we can practice insight meditation anywhere, anytime. Since the way is still here, enlightenment can occur at any time.

To observe everything so that your experience becomes one of continuous, moment-to-moment mindfulness – that’s the correct path. That’s what the Buddha meant by the right way. Not all meditation techniques go in the direction of nibbana. Only this way, the Buddha said. Only by practicing mindfulness can we destroy greed, hatred and delusion and reach enlightenment. It doesn’t matter if the Buddha is still in the world or not. People can find the truth from observing their own bodies and minds.

For the first foundation of mindfulness we observe body-objects. The body-objects that we use are 1) motion and 2) posture. Posture means: sitting standing, walking, and lying down. These are the main objects. The principal object is ‘rising and falling’ [the expanding and contracting motions of the abdomen that result from respiration].

The second foundation is feeling. We observe unpleasant, pleasant, or neutral feeling, whether it arises from body or mind. [Although the body can be a condition for feeling to arise, feeling itself is always a mental phenomenon.]

The third foundation is consciousness. Thinking is a consciousness object. Even when the mind wanders, that wandering mind can become an object for mindfulness.

The fourth foundation includes emotions such as the five hindrances: anger, lust, doubt, sleepiness, and restlessness. And the five sense-impressions: sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches. All of them can become objects of mindfulness if you try to ‘come back to the present moment’ to know what is going on now. Using the technique of insight meditation, you will see for yourself that mind and matter arise and pass away every moment – that they are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and impersonal. When you see that, how can you cling to them? How can you build more desire, hatred and delusion?

All you need to do is come back to the present moment. That means to bring your attention back to rupa and nama as they arise – only that. To come back to the present moment means to observe sitting, standing walking or lying down – or any of the other objects.

Sometimes you’ll just observe rupa, the body. That’s all right. You don’t need to worry about nama (mental) objects at first. Not until mindfulness is stable. Then mindfulness will be strong enough to observe more subtle objects. First you take care of mindfulness, then mindfulness will take care of you.

When it’s strong, mindfulness will stop greed, hatred and delusion from taking over. It’ll stop mental formations from building something good or bad based on the objects that appear to you. It’s very important to build mindfulness first, to take care of it first. Afterwards it will take care of everything that happens in your life and in your mind.

Just do it. Meaning, just turn the hand [referring to a meditation exercise using hand movements. See "How to Meditate"]. At same time, observe how you feel. By ‘feeling’ I don’t mean sensation. Just know the feeling of the hand moving, that’s all – the feeling of knowing the motion. Just do it lightly. You don’t have to concentrate too much or try very hard or pay attention too much. Just keep doing it.

Practicing vipassana means to give the mind a job to work on. That’s all you need to do. The job of the mind means that when you aren’t observing the hand moving, you observe the rising-and-falling movements of the abdomen [or another object]. That’s the job of the mind, too. The mind is still working with or observing the process of life from one moment to the next. But right now we move the hand. That means the mind is working with the hand motions. Just allow the mind to work. The mind means consciousness. Just turn the hand and raise it up lightly, smoothly. You don’t have to use too much intention.

In observing the first foundation, the body, you have to understand the two definitions of ‘body.’ That’s what the Pali text says. One is the body that results from karma [volitional action] we did in the past.

The physical body as a whole is a result from karma. Whether our bodies have all the correct parts or not depends on the karma we did before [in previous lifetimes]. If someone is born without all ten fingers, for example, or is missing some other part of the body, that’s a result of karma. If someone’s body is complete, it’s a good result from actions they did in previous lifetimes. [However, simply being born as a human being, in whatever circumstances, is considered the result of good karma.]

We can’t make use of the physical body itself for insight meditation because it doesn’t come from causes in the present moment [i.e., it's already formed. We can't make it or see it come into being now]. But since we already have a body, we have to have a mind in it, right?

The mind makes certain physical phenomena appear in the present moment. These are the second type of body. What are these physical phenomena? One of them is motion. The motion that appears in the present moment when you move an arm or a leg is different from the arm or leg itself. The first one comes from the mind. The second comes from karma.

Once we’re born, we can’t make the body look like this or that according to our desire, right? There’s nothing much we can do to change it. But in the present time, consciousness makes motion arise. Motion is ‘rupa.’ [Here, rupa means a physical phenomenon that can be directly experienced as an object of the mind.]

The Pali text says that we should observe ‘the body in the body.’ But what is in the body? What is in the hand? We can describe bones and muscles and tendons. Or we can say there are four elements in the hand: water, earth, fire and air, nothing else. But that isn’t the meaning of ‘in the body.’ According to the Satipatthana Sutta, ‘in the body’ means the motion or activity of the physical body. It comes from the mind. The mind makes it happen.

The physical body that comes from our parents is the body from karma. But that body has to sit, stand, walk, work and eat. The actions of the body are ‘body in the body.’ By observing the actions of the body, you develop the first foundation of mindfulness.

Another rupa [material phenomenon] that comes from the mind is posture. The mind makes the body sit, stand, walk, and move in the present. The sitting posture is ‘in the body’ – it comes from the mind. When the mind wants to sit, it makes the body sit. When the mind wants to stand up, it makes the body stand. The mind wants to walk – it makes the feet move step-by-step. The mind wants to lie down – it makes the body lie down. Those are the four postures that come from the mind. The mind makes them happen in the present. That means these postures and motions can be objects of mindfulness.

That’s very profound and subtle – not easy to understand. It’s difficult because the Pali text [in the Satipatthana Sutta] has many descriptions about the physical body and its thirty-two parts. It gives instructions about concentrating on dead bodies in cemeteries in the tradition of the forest monks. But actually those are concentration exercises.

Many meditation teachers make the mistake that observing the thirty-two parts of the body or contemplating a dead body is insight meditation [see the revered text, the Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga) which states that the latter are concentration, not vipassana, exercises]. If we don’t understand how to separate the physical body from its movement, it’s very hard to use the body as a foundation for mindfulness. We just make a mistake. That’s why the Pali text explains that we should observe ‘the body in the body.’

Unless you understand how to put mindfulness on the correct foundation, it can’t stay. So you have to separate the physical body, which is the result of karma, from the body’s movement, which comes from the mind. You can see movement happening right now. It comes from consciousness. The body from karma can’t become the object of mindfulness. But the motion of that physical body can be an object for mindfulness.

We should observe only motion or posture when observing the body in meditation. We can use the motion of the leg, the hand or the abdomen [i.e., the abdominal movements from respiration] as a foundation. But we can’t use the hand, leg or abdomen themselves as foundations for mindfulness. That’s impossible. Why? Because the hand is just material or matter. It has nothing to do with the mind. We can use the physical body to develop concentration, but we can’t put mindfulness on the hand itself, or the leg, or any part of the body.

So you need to be smart to separate the body’s motion and posture from its corporeality, in order to get the correct foundation to put mindfulness on. That’s why [in the hand motions exercise] I tell you to observe the movement of the hand. Don’t pay attention to the hand itself. Just observe the motion. Only motion can become the foundation, not the physical hand. If you’re still observing the hand, that’s not the correct foundation.

It’s the same when observing the rising-falling motions of the abdomen. Don’t focus on the stomach or the physical body part. Just notice the feeling of motion. By ‘feeling’ I don’t mean the feeling of pleasure or pain that’s the second foundation of mindfulness. Just know the movement when the abdomen rises and falls. That’s the foundation to put mindfulness on. The technique is to keep mindfulness continuous whether you’re sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. Don’t give a gap for delusion.

If you don’t have the correct foundation, mindfulness can’t stay, can’t grow. Mindfulness is like a flower seed. All of you have the seeds of mindfulness. But you have to understand how to plant the seeds in good soil. You have to water them, just like one of the monks in this temple waters the flowers every day. All of us have seeds of mindfulness but we don’t understand how to take care of them or how to plant them where they’ll grow. Sometimes we put mindfulness on the sand. How can it grow? Sometimes we put it on the concrete. It dries up. Sometimes we put the seeds of mindfulness in a lake. They rot and never grow. Many people think they have mindfulness, but they put it in the wrong place.

When the sun shines against a tree it casts a shadow. You can see the shadow. The shadow has the same shape as the tree, but it isn’t identical to the tree. You can touch the tree. It’s always there in front of the temple. It stays permanently. But the shadow is only there sometimes.

The shadow depends on the sun. It depends on the tree too, but if there’s no sun there can be no shadow. The shadow is impermanent but the tree [for all practical purposes] is permanent. Some trees live for thirty or forty or even a hundred years. But the shadow is impermanent [in the sense of being momentary]. In the morning the sun appears in the east and the shadow shows on this side. In the evening, when the sun goes west, the shadow changes to the east. It moves little by little all the time. But the tree stays in the same place. So the shadow is impermanent but the tree is permanent.

Now, the physical body that comes from karma is like the tree. The mind is like the sun. The activity of the body is like the shadow. Just as the shadow is caused by the sun, the motion of the body comes from the mind. We practice insight meditation to see the truth of impermanence. We observe the activity of the body because it’s impermanent, like the shadow.

So when we talk about the first foundation of mindfulness, we mean movement and posture. The objects to observe are: 1) the rising and falling motions of the abdomen [that occur from respiration]; 2) the motion of the feet during walking meditation; 3) the motion of the hand during the hand movements exercise; 4) the sitting posture; 5) the standing posture 6) the lying down posture, and 7) touch-points.

The last body-object we haven’t talked about yet. It’s called a touching-point. That means you bring the mind to rest on a point on the body for one moment at a time, just being aware of knowing the contact – the contact of the mind ‘touching’ that point. [This is mental touching, not physical.] There is still movement present because the mind moves. Mindfulness can watch as the mind moves to that point, lets the point go, then returns to it again. And you can see the moment of contact arise and vanish.

You can also observe other movements such as the act of reaching for a cup, the movement of the arm when washing your face, and so on. Any physical action can become the foundation for mindfulness if you observe it as it’s happening, in the present moment.

Second Foundation
Feeling is the second foundation of mindfulness. Feeling objects are more subtle than body-objects. There is feeling that comes from the physical body. When people sit too long they get pain or numbness. They can’t stay in the same posture for long but have to move around. That’s the suffering that comes from sitting or standing. Like the physical body, feeling is the result of previous karma.

You should observe those mental factors that accompany feeling or result from feeling. When you sit more than thirty minutes, you feel uncomfortable. That’s the nature of the physical body. It happens to everyone. You can’t prevent it. But what happens then? When people feel pain, they usually aren’t aware of it because they move too quickly. If they aren’t practicing meditation they change position right away. They follow their desire without knowing what’s happening. So one of the mental factors that arises from feeling is desire. That means that ‘in’ unpleasant feeling, or accompanying unpleasant feeling, is desire.

Think about it. You want something – you want to change posture. Wanting is desire. When you change to another sitting position without awareness, you forget about the pain because you think, “Wow – now it’s good. I can keep sitting.” But after ten or twenty minutes, the pain begins again. You don’t ask yourself, “Is the pain that comes from this posture the same as the pain I felt in the old posture? Or is it different?” You don’t care. You just want to change back again, want to move back again.

So you move back to the original position. What causes you to do that? Desire. But the old position caused pain, too, remember? It’s the posture you moved out of in the first place. So you see that ‘in’ [dependent on] feeling is desire. And desire is a cause of suffering. Desire causes you to return to a position that will later become painful.

Finally, you can’t sit anymore, so you stand up. You stand up because you were feeling pain. It’s desire that wants to stand up, that wants to avoid the pain. Desire makes people change posture. That means that ‘in’ feeling is the cause of suffering, because the Buddha said that desire is the cause of suffering.

Desire doesn’t just mean wanting to do something. Disliking is desire, too [because you want to avoid something]. There are three kinds of desire: liking, disliking, and wanting to change to something new – wanting to get a new posture or sight or smell or something else. Liking comes from desire. Disliking comes from hatred. Wanting to get something different comes from delusion.

Say that I’m sitting. I have pain so I want to change position, because I want to feel good. That’s how liking or wanting causes physical motion to occur. The new posture arises because of wanting – because I want to move into a new posture.

When I dislike sitting in the old posture, I want to take the pain away. I have to move or change position because I want to take the unpleasant feeling away. That’s how disliking becomes desire. I want to do something else. When you get mad at something you want to get rid of it, want to make it go away. That becomes a cause of suffering. When you change position without mindfulness, you continue to generate suffering, because desire is the cause of suffering. All three levels of desire become a cause of suffering.

You can stop the process by observing ‘feeling in the feeling.’ That means to observe the desire that arises from feeling, instead of acting on the desire right away. When you feel pain, you have to observe the feeling before changing posture. But it’s important to know how to deal with pain. Don’t try to control it or suppress it with concentration. Just accept it. Just understand that it comes from sitting too long. After that you can change position slowly, observing your movements step-by-step as you change into a new position.

But don’t change position with wrong view. Wrong view means thinking, “I want to change posture because the new position will feel good.” You want to get happiness. Usually, everyone wants to change because they make a mistake. They think, “If I change, I’ll get happiness.” But sooner or later even the new posture becomes painful.

I have a saying: “Don’t want to change; have to change.” If you understand that you have to change position because the uncomfortable feeling is too strong, you won’t make the mistake of liking the new posture. You’ll know that the new posture is only comfortable for a short time. You’ll understand that suffering forces the change in posture.

Even the Lord Buddha had pain when he stayed in one position too long. All of the arahants [Enlightened Ones] have unpleasant feeling from sitting too long, too. But they aren’t upset by it. They understand that it’s the result from sitting and can’t be avoided.

But for us, disliking or aversion always arises in response to pain. That’s different from the Lord Buddha and the arahants. They understood what is ‘in’ the pain. They understood that they had to change position because the suffering was too strong, but they didn’t feel disliking or hatred for the pain. They didn’t have the desire to get a good feeling. Pain appears because the physical elements are unbalanced. Enlightened beings understand that they have to change the position of the body because the elements are unbalanced.

So you should observe every kind of feeling, whether pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, without liking or disliking. That’s the Middle Way.

Third Foundation
The third foundation of mindfulness is consciousness. Thinking is a consciousness object. When your mind wanders away from the main object to think about something, just be aware that you’re thinking. When you’re aware, note, ‘thinking’ or ‘wandering mind,’ then return to the main object or the principal object. Don’t think more. Don’t describe what you’re thinking about or get interested in it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re thinking about something good or bad. Forget about good and bad. Don’t pay attention to the content of the thought. Just observe thinking to see that it arises and passes away. To observe consciousness means to observe ‘the one who knows.’ The ‘one who knows’ is the mind, the observer. Just go back to observe the mind itself, the knowing itself.

Even when the mind wanders, that wandering mind can become an object of mindfulness if you’re aware of it, and if you observe the one who knows. The ‘one who knows’ is mindfulness or awareness or clear comprehension. If you aren’t aware that the mind has wandered but you’re still observing the mind [if you are observing the story that the mind is spinning], that’s ignorance and desire.

Usually the mind wants to think, wants to fool around. That’s desire. You know that you’re thinking, but you aren’t knowing the correct moment [you aren't observing the phenomenon of thinking arising and passing away, but instead are becoming involved in the content of the thought]. That means knowing by ignorance. Ignorance doesn’t mean someone who knows nothing. Ignorance means that you don’t know the truth or can’t see that the mind arises and passes away from moment to moment. [Consciousness (and its mental factors) arises and vanishes from moment to moment every time it focuses on an object. With each new object, consciousness arises again, and then dissolves.]

At first your mind will wander out often. That’s all right. Even if the mind wanders many times per minute, just keep knowing ‘wandering mind’ and return to the main object. When mindfulness gets stronger the mind will wander less and less often. Just keep coming back to the present moment over and over, a thousand times, a million times. That’s the practice of insight meditation.

Fourth Foundation
The fourth foundation of mindfulness is a large group containing many kinds of objects.

All emotions are included in this foundation. As you meditate, pleasant and unpleasant emotions will arise. How should you observe anger, happiness, anxiety and other emotions? By looking at them as if they were actors. But don’t become an actor. Don’t get involved with them. Don’t get onstage. Just watch the play. Sometimes the actors show excitement or happiness. Sometimes they show anger, frustration, fear or sadness.

Say to yourself, “They’re not me,” and only watch them to see how long they last. If you don’t get involved with them, if you don’t cling to them, if you don’t think that they belong to you, you won’t suffer at all. Only know them, see them, watch them, like watching actors on T.V. When they finish their duty to show this or that thing they leave. Then another actor comes, another feeling or another object. But they aren’t real. In the ultimate sense, what they show isn’t true – it’s just an appearance. And these actors – these feelings and emotions – change all the time.

You believe that everything belongs to you: the body, feeling, memory, mental formations, emotions and consciousness. You think: I am seeing, I am liking, I am disliking, I am hearing, I am smelling, tasting, feeling. We believe that everything belongs to us because we form attachment to all these things. But by the truth, these five khandhas [the five phenomena we regard as self: corporeality, feeling, consciousness, perception, and mental formations] do not belong to anyone. Even your body doesn’t really belong to you. Your mind doesn’t belong to you, either, because you can’t determine what kinds of thoughts will arise. Things just appear in the mind according to conditions.

There are a few more objects belonging to the fourth foundation of mindfulness that are very important for practicing insight meditation. These are: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. You have to observe or focus on objects from every one of the five senses as they arise. An advanced meditator can practice anywhere, any time by observing sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.

In the Buddha’s time there was a man named Bahiya. One day he followed the Lord Buddha on his alms round, asking for meditation instruction. The Buddha gave him a very short answer: “When you see, just see; when you hear, just hear; when you think, just think; and when you know, just know.” Bahiya got enlightened right away, faster than any of the other disciples.

So just do it. Just observe and let go. Focus and forget it. When you’re thinking, don’t get involved with the content of the thought. Don’t attach to anything that’s going on around you. Just let it go. It’s very important to know how you can just see, just hear, just smell, just touch, just think, just sit, just walk, just stand, just lie down and just move, whether those objects are pleasant or unpleasant. Don’t care whether an object is good or bad. That’s not your duty. Only focus and forget it.

‘Focus’ means to put mindfulness on the object correctly, to pay attention to it. After that, forget it. Why? Because an object of the mind never stays. It isn’t permanent. It will change and disappear. Why do you have to keep clinging to it or thinking about it? Why do you have to resist something unpleasant?

Don’t cling to something good or resist something bad, because good and bad are the same one. They’re like your hand. When you turn it over, you can see the palm. When you turn it again, you can see the back. But it’s the same hand. Good and bad are like that. When bad comes to an end, it turns to become good. When good is finished, it changes to bad. Actually, they are the same one. So why attach to them?

You become attached to something good, but then it changes because everything is impermanent. When it changes to bad you’re still clinging, clinging to the bad thing too, even though you don’t like it. Then you resist a bad object, but it’s impermanent, too. And when it changes to good, you’re still resisting [because you haven't noticed that the bad thing has already passed away] – so you resist the good, too. What can you say? When you don’t understand that everything changes very fast, you just feel excited with something good or try to avoid something bad. But by the truth, there’s no difference. Good is just arising and passing away. Bad is just arising and passing away, too.

For example, when you hear pleasant words, the sound only lasts a short time and then it’s gone. The good sound can’t stay very long. It arises and passes away right away. It’s the same when hearing a bad sound. If you just hear the sound [instead of clinging to the meaning of the words] a good sound isn’t different from a bad one. It’s different only because people attach to the conventional meaning and say, “This is a good word, that’s a bad word.” But in truth we only have two objects, rupa and nama. Those are the only objects of mindfulness. They aren’t good or bad.

So, just see, just hear, just smell, just touch, just think, just sit, just walk, just stand, just lie down, and just move. When you hear, only observe hearing the sound. Don’t think about whether it’s a good sound or a bad sound. Don’t cling to it as belonging to you and think, “I am hearing.” Only observe hearing and let it go. Whether you smell a good scent or a bad one doesn’t matter. When you smell something, just observe that moment of smelling. Don’t think, “I am smelling something.”

When eating, don’t like or dislike the taste of the food. It doesn’t matter whether it’s junk food or health food, delicious or awful. When you taste it, just observe the act of knowing the taste. That’s the middle way between liking and disliking. When you touch something, just observe the feeling of contact. When thinking, just know that there’s thinking. Don’t get involved with the content of the thought. If it’s a pleasant thought, don’t cling to it. If it’s a negative thought, don’t get upset. Just know, “Thinking is happening now.” That’s the Middle Way.

All five sense-impressions are rupa (material phenomena). Nama (mind) is aware of them. Color is rupa; nama sees color. Sound is rupa; nama hears sound. Fragrance is rupa; nama smells fragrance. Taste is rupa; nama knows taste. A touch is rupa; nama knows touch. When you practice insight meditation you must be aware of color, sound, taste, smell and touch as they arise in the present. Don’t describe them or think about them more. Just know them as they appear.

Just seeing, just hearing, just touching, just tasting, and just smelling: that means that when you practice mindfulness you stop at the point of seeing or hearing before you get to the name of the thing. [You're aware of the sight, etc., before the mind has time to recognize or name it. In daily life, perception and recognition seem to be simultaneous. But with mindfulness you can be aware of the pure sense-datum before evaluating it.] That way you separate ultimate reality from conventional truth.

Conventional truth means the name of the object. [Picks up a bell] This is a bell, right? [Picks up a tape recorder] This is the tape recorder. People make up the names of these things. That’s conventional truth. The bell is not the tape recorder. The tape recorder isn’t the bell. That’s true, right? But that’s conventional truth.

When practicing vipassana, the bell is just rupa because you just see the color when you look at it. The tape cassette is just rupa, too. You just see color, which is rupa. According to ultimate truth, there’s no difference between the bell and the tape recorder because in both cases you only see color.

It’s the same when hearing sound. [Rings bell] Everybody hears the same sound. English people say they hear a bell. But that’s not true. Thai people say they hear a rakang. But that’s not true, either. How can you hear a bell or a rakang? You don’t hear a bell – you only hear sound. The bell can’t physically go to your ear. [Points to the bell on the floor] It’s still here, right?

The sound is rupa. Ear consciousness hears it. But English people say, “I’m hearing a bell,” and Thai people say, “I’m hearing a rakang.” They are hearing the same thing, the same sound waves. But the language is different. That’s conventional truth – the name of the thing, or the words to describe it as good or bad. People make it up.

Conventional truth means the name of the thing. But ultimate truth means just rupa [material phenomena] and nama [mental phenomena]. Try to remember that the objects of awareness in vipassana are only rupa and nama. All four foundations of mindfulness can be reduced to these two: rupa and rupa.

If you don’t understand rupa and nama, how can you practice vipassana? If you don’t remember what rupa and nama are – well, that’s all right if you have a teacher who can give instruction and tell you how to keep observing from moment-to-moment with mindfulness. But if you don’t understand what rupa and nama are, and the teacher can’t tell you exactly how to observe from moment-to-moment, there’s no way to follow the technique of vipassana at all. Then you’re just practicing another kind of meditation or using concentration to suppress emotions or feel peaceful for a short time.

So when you practice vipassana, you have to understand what rupa is and what nama is. Just remember rupa and nama. I’ll conclude by saying: sitting is rupa, standing is rupa, walking is rupa, lying down is rupa, moving the hand is rupa. The agent that knows these phenomena is nama, the mind. Also, color is rupa, sound is rupa, smell is rupa, taste is rupa, and [tactile] contact is rupa.

The agent that sees a picture, smells, hears, tastes, or touches, is nama. The meditator has to observe or focus on every sense. You can practice this way in daily life, by observing the sense-objects. A long time ago the Buddha taught people to practice vipassana and they were able to practice at home, at work, or anywhere because they understood that.

Practicing insight meditation is easy because we use the materials from daily life. You don’t have to do anything special or different. All you have to do is observe what is happening NOW. Just know: seeing, smelling, touching, tasting, hearing, thinking, and feeling. Just be aware of anger, excitement, fear and other emotions when they appear. Just know and let go. If you keep observing the four foundations of mindfulness without liking or disliking, you will gain wisdom and reach the happiness of nibbana.

Edited by Cynthia Thatcher

Taken from: http://www.vipassanadhura.com/fourfoundations.html

Jon Kabat-Zinn leads a session on Mindfulness at Google.

Daily, I try my best to walk this Pure Beautiful Path. Meditating and reading the Dharma daily. I am starting to see the changes in my life, from being less anxious and more like the controller of a situation. Not allowing anger to shine through when someone does wrong to me, but brushing it away like dirt and then wish peace unto him or her. Is it easy? No, not at all. I am dealing with my past karma. All the wrong seeds I sowed, I see it coming back to haunt me, but like the Buddha did under the grove tree, I take no heed to mara. The seeds of my past were from pure ignorance. I see it in a dream, I hear it when I walk or drive, but I take no heed to mara. I go into meditation and quiet all my thoughts and make my mind still like the water. I empty myself from all that I know. I study, reflect and meditate on the Dharma and from there I learn how to control my life. I understand in order to gain control or to become the Master of my life, I need to put in time and effort to see a transformation.

I titled this writing, “You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it will cost you.” It is based on karma, conditioning, and dealing with it.

This reminds me of a story about a person who adopted a young dog. The young dog was cute and playful but it barked furiously at anybody that rang the door bell. This became a huge problem for the owner because it was a continuous behavior from the dog. One day the owner thought of a trick to distract and pacify the dog when ever the door bell rings. When ever the door bell rang, the owner would take out a doggy treat and give it to the dog, and immediately the dog would run to the doggy treat and chew on it and forget that the door bell rang. This would pacify the dog so much that the owner had no trouble opening the door and invite his friends or family into the house. Again and again this occurred, the door bell would ring and the dog would get a treat. This went on for years and the dog never knew the difference. So as years went by and the dog got really old along with its owner, the owner stop giving doggy treats to the dog but the dog learned stop barking at the door bell. But the dog was so used to getting a doggy treat when the bell rang, that the dog would salivate all over the carpet when ever he heard the sound of the door bell. The owner would get so angry because the dog would salivate all over the carpet. But the owner realized that he has conditioned his dog to expect a treat every time the door bell rang.

So, we are like this old dog, we have conditioned ourselves for many, many years to think a certain way, act a certain way, live a certain way. That “certain way” is the ego’s way, the self-centered way. We were so accustomed to I want, I want, I want and me, me, me. We have learned how to cheat, how to lie, how to curse, how to lust, how to hate, how to be angry, how to gossip etc.. And now we have come to a point in our lives that we want to change and become a better person. I want to be kind, I want to love, I want to serve and help mankind, and walk a Pure Path. But we will need to face and deal with the karma we sowed. We have to deal with the bad habits we once lived with. All these seeds we planted are in the mind. Now we are putting away our bad habits and saying “Good bye to the bad guy and hello to the good guy.” But the issue is we are haunted by the attitude from our past on a daily basis. Its the voice in us that says, “That person is an idiot,” or “shut up, don’t bother me.” These were old attitudes that once conditioned us and by living it we have sowed those seeds of bad karma.

But the good news is, we can learn new tricks to get us out of this mess. New tricks that will put an end to suffering. New tricks that will eliminate the bad karma, but it will cost you. What does it cost? Time and effort on a daily basis.

Dhammapada -The Way
“It is you who must make the effort.
The masters only point the way.
But if you meditate and follow the law
you will free yourself from desire.”

Freeing yourself from desire is the main goal. You will need to spend time in meditation to figure out what are these conditions that are in your mind and you will have to address them one by one. By meditating and making a conscious effort to being mindful of everything that comes into your mind. By practicing mindfulness we are analyzing all of our thoughts and stopping the stream of the bad ones. The bad thought comes but you must reject and detach from that concept, because that is not you thinking but your false self, the old you. Let go and drop the bad thought like a hot potato.

Yes, it will be challenging, sometimes the thoughts seem to be so thick you do not know how will you be able to cut right through it. And when you are meditating the mind can be so noisy, filled with thoughts and images. Don’t worry, don’t get depressed, don’t get discouraged. It all takes time.

Here is a quote from the book “Entering The Stream” that helped me.
“As meditators, we would be wise not to become depressed or discouraged when faced with these difficulties, but instead to understand that it takes time it change the ingrained mental habits of years. It can be done only by working repeatedly, continuously, patiently, and persistently.”

So no matter how bad our past was, and how many things we were so used to doing, we can change the way of thinking, we can change the pattern. Practicing meditation and learning the Dharma will liberate you. Put in time and effort and be determine.

I hope this was of some kind of help to you as it was for me.
Take care, be well and Namaste!

Your Internet Friend!

Excerpts from the BBC documentary ‘The Mindful Way’ which show Luang Por Chah (also available in full on video.google.com), briefly featuring the young Ajahn Liam who was later nominated by Luang Por Chah to lead Wat Pah Pong and continues to do so.
For more video, audio and text see http://www.watnongpahpong.org
http://www.ajahnchah.org
Video series of biography of Ajahn Chah: http://www.ajahnchah.org/videos.htm

Papaji speaks about watchfulness – paying attention to one Self – and realising the true nature of maya-illusion. Hari OM.

By Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

“Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. Just by sitting and doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.”

In my last column I discussed why mindfulness is essential to spiritual practice, for no matter what spiritual tradition we follow, we must have a mind that is able to stay in the present moment if our understanding and experience is to deepen. Now I would like to talk about some aspects of the actual mindfulness practice.

In mindfulness, or shamatha, meditation, we are trying to achieve a mind that is stable and calm. What we begin to discover is that this calmness or harmony is a natural aspect of the mind. Through mindfulness practice we are just developing and strengthening it, and eventually we are able to remain peacefully in our mind without struggling. Our mind naturally feels content.

An important point is that when we are in a mindful state, there is still intelligence. It’s not as if we blank out. Sometimes people think that a person who is in deep meditation doesn’t know what’s going on—that it’s like being asleep. In fact, there are meditative states where you deny sense perceptions their function, but this is not the accomplishment of shamatha practice.

Creating a Favorable Environment

There are certain conditions that are helpful for the practice of mindfulness. When we create the right environment it’s easier to practice.

It is good if the place where you meditate, even if it’s only a small space in your apartment, has a feeling of upliftedness and sacredness. It is also said that you should meditate in a place that is not too noisy or disturbing, and you should not be in a situation where your mind is going to be easily provoked into anger or jealousy or other emotions. If you are disturbed or irritated, then your practice is going to be affected.

Beginning the Practice

I encourage people to meditate frequently but for short periods of time—ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes. If you force it too much the practice can take on too much of a personality, and training the mind should be very, very simple. So you could meditate for ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening, and during that time you are really working with the mind. Then you just stop, get up, and go.

Often we just plop ourselves down to meditate and just let the mind take us wherever it may. We have to create a personal sense of discipline. When we sit down, we can remind ourselves: “I’m here to work on my mind. I’m here to train my mind.” It’s okay to say that to yourself when you sit down, literally. We need that kind of inspiration as we begin to practice.

Posture

The Buddhist approach is that the mind and body are connected. The energy flows better when the body is erect, and when it’s bent, the flow is changed and that directly affects your thought process. So there is a yoga of how to work with this. We’re not sitting up straight because we’re trying to be good schoolchildren; our posture actually affects the mind.

People who need to use a chair for meditation should sit upright with their feet touching the ground. Those using a meditation cushion such as a zafu or gomden should find a comfortable position with legs crossed and hands resting palm-down on your thighs. The hips are neither rotated forward too much, which creates tension, nor tilted back so you start slouching. You should have a feeling of stability and strength.

When we sit down the first thing we need to do is to really inhabit our body—really have a sense of our body. Often we sort of prop ourselves up and pretend we’re practicing, but we can’t even feel our body; we can’t even feel where it is. Instead, we need to be right here. So when you begin a meditation session, you can spend some initial time settling into your posture. You can feel that your spine is being pulled up from the top of your head so your posture is elongated, and then settle.

The basic principle is to keep an upright, erect posture. You are in a solid situation: your shoulders are level, your hips are level, your spine is stacked up. You can visualize putting your bones in the right order and letting your flesh hang off that structure. We use this posture in order to remain relaxed and awake. The practice we’re doing is very precise: you should be very much awake even though you are calm. If you find yourself getting dull or hazy or falling asleep, you should check your posture.

Gaze

For strict mindfulness practice, the gaze should be downward focusing a couple of inches in front of your nose. The eyes are open but not staring; your gaze is soft. We are trying to reduce sensory input as much as we can. People say, “Shouldn’t we have a sense of the environment?” but that’s not our concern in this practice. We’re just trying to work with the mind and the more we raise our gaze, the more distracted we’re going to be. It’s as if you had an overhead light shining over the whole room, and all of a sudden you focus it down right in front of you. You are purposefully ignoring what is going on around you. You are putting the horse of mind in a smaller corral.

Breath

When we do shamatha practice, we become more and more familiar with our mind, and in particular we learn to recognize the movement of the mind, which we experience as thoughts. We do this by using an object of meditation to provide a contrast or counterpoint to what’s happening in our mind. As soon as we go off and start thinking about something, awareness of the object of meditation will bring us back. We could put a rock in front of us and use it to focus our mind, but using the breath as the object of meditation is particularly helpful because it relaxes us.

As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed.

Thoughts

No matter what kind of thought comes up, you should say to yourself, “That may be a really important issue in my life, but right now is not the time to think about it. Now I’m practicing meditation.” It gets down to how honest we are, how true we can be to ourselves, during each session.

Everyone gets lost in thought sometimes. You might think, “I can’t believe I got so absorbed in something like that,” but try not to make it too personal. Just try to be as unbiased as possible. Mind will be wild and we have to recognize that. We can’t push ourselves. If we’re trying to be completely concept-free, with no discursiveness at all, it’s just not going to happen.

So through the labeling process, we simply see our discursiveness. We notice that we have been lost in thought, we mentally label it “thinking”—gently and without judgment—and we come back to the breath. When we have a thought—no matter how wild or bizarre it may be—we just let it go and come back to the breath, come back to the situation here.

Each meditation session is a journey of discovery to understand the basic truth of who we are. In the beginning the most important lesson of meditation is seeing the speed of the mind. But the meditation tradition says that mind doesn’t have to be this way: it just hasn’t been worked with.

What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. And because we are working with the mind that experiences life directly, just by sitting and doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is holder of the Buddhist and Shambhala lineages of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He has received teachings from many of the great Buddhist masters of this century, including Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Penor Rinpoche and his father Trungpa Rinpoche. In 1995 he was recognized as the incarnation of the great nineteenth-century Buddhist teacher Mipham Rinpoche.

How to do Mindfulness Meditation, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Shambhala Sun, January 2000.

In the rush and clamor of daily life, it is all too easy to become so preoccupied with our own opinions and desires that we may easily forget to pay attention to what is really important. Our awareness of the glory and magnificence of the present moment is often given very little attention as we chase headlong after our own personal goals and ambitions in the never ending, never satisfied pursuits of the self-centered ego. Certainly we each need to have some measure of concern for ourselves, but when the whims of the ego become an all encompassing obsession, we have lost our awareness of what is really important, we have lost our true nature, we have lost our awareness of the Divine Presence.

Human beings living in their shells are mostly unaware of the privilege of life and so are unthankful to the Giver of it. In order to see the grace of God man must open his eyes and raise his head from his little world. Then he will see — above and below, to the right and the left, before and behind — the grace of God reaching him from everywhere in abundance.

from The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Volume XIV, Every Man Has His Own Little World

Muhammad Abu Hashim Madani, Inayat Khan’s spiritual teacher, expressed these same thoughts so magnificently when he said:

There is only one virtue and one sin for a soul on this path;
virtue when he is conscious of God,
and sin when he is not.

Many speak of annihilation of the ego, but perhaps a more useful way to approach this situation is to realize that we must put the ego in it’s proper place as a humble and useful servant, not as the master which it aspires to be. Here are some thoughts about this process of overcoming the ego:

The point is not to deny our ego, but to extricate ourselves from our exclusive preoccupation with it.

– from One-Liners, by Ram Dass

Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

– Jesus, Gospel of St Matthew 6:33

Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life, and yet less attached to it.

– from One-Liners, by Ram Dass

I abandoned and forgot myself, laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

– St John of the cross

While such inspirational words may seem like wonderful ideals, it is not enough to merely acknowledge these ideals, we must find ways to put these ideals into continual practice in our own daily life. In the Buddhist tradition, the sound of the bell is often used as a reminder to stop the chatter and become mindfully aware of the present moment, in which there is always the opportunity for a joyful sense of awe, wonder and appreciation. In everyday life there are many distractions and annoyances, yet even these distractions and annoyances can be used to our advantage if we use them as a reminder to recall the essential nature of our True Self, as in the following magnificent example from Thich Nhat Hanh:

Driving is a daily task in this society. I am not suggesting that you stop driving, just that you do it consciously. While we are driving, we think only about arriving. Therefore, every time that we see a red light, we are not very happy. The red light is a kind on enemy that prevents us from attaining our goal. But we can also see the red light as a bell of mindfulness, reminding us to return to the present moment. The next time you see a red light, please smile at it and go back to your [spiritual practices]… It is easy to transform a feeling of irritation into a pleasant feeling. Although it is the same red light, it becomes different. It becomes a friend, helping us to remember that it is only in the present moment that we can live our lives…

The next time you are caught in a traffic jam, don’t fight it. It’s useless to fight. Sit back and smile to yourself, a smile of compassion and loving kindness. Enjoy the present moment, breathing and smiling, and make the other people in your car happy. Happiness is there if you know how to breathe and smile, because happiness can always be found in the present moment. Practicing meditation is to go back to the present moment to encounter the flower, the blue sky, the child. Happiness is available.

from Peace is Every Step, The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, by Thich Nhat Hanh

Although it may be easiest to use something simple such as a red traffic light to begin this wonderful practice, there are no limits to the situations or conditions that can be accommodated if one is truly sincere and mindful. Physical pain, emotional pain and all manner of suffering can be overcome through the use of this same beautiful practice.

It is only love that can bring about that happiness of which is spoken in legends, which is beyond all pleasures of this mortal world. … Love is the fire that burns all infirmities.

Question: How do we see the love of God in the book of nature? We see all around us fruits and plants and animal life brought to fruition and then to destruction, and among men cruelty, misery, tragedies and enmities everywhere.

Answer: It is a difference of focus. If we focus our mind upon all that is good and beautiful we shall see — in spite of all the ugliness that exists in nature and especially more pronounced in human nature — that the ugliness will cover itself. We will spread a cover over it and see all that is beautiful, and to whatever lacks beauty we will be able to add, taking it from all that is beautiful in our heart where beauty has sufficiently been collected. But if we focus our mind upon all the ugliness that exists in nature — and in human nature — there will be much of it. It will take up all our attention and there will come a time when we shall not be able to see any good anywhere. We shall see all cruelty, ugliness, wickedness and unkindness everywhere.

Question: In focusing our mind on beauty alone, is there not a danger of shutting our eyes to the ugliness and suffering we might alleviate?

Answer: In order to help the poor we ought to be rich, and in order to take away the badness of a person we ought to be so much more good. That goodness must be earned, as money is earned. That earning of goodness is collecting goodness wherever we find it, and if we do not focus on goodness we will not be able to collect it sufficiently. What happens is that man becomes agitated by all the absence of goodness he sees. Being himself poor he cannot add to it, and unconsciously he develops in his own nature what he sees. He thinks, ‘Oh poor person! I should so much like you to be good’, but that does not help that person. His looking at the badness, his agitation, only adds one more wicked person to the lot. When one has focused one’s eyes on goodness one will add to beauty, but when a man’s eyes are focused on what is bad he will collect enough wickedness for him to be added himself to the number of the wicked in the end, for he receives the same impression.

Besides, by criticizing, by judging, by looking at wickedness with contempt, one does not help the wicked or the stupid person. The one who helps is he who is ready to overlook, who is ready to forgive, to tolerate, to take disadvantages he may have to meet with patiently. It is he who can help.

A person who is able to help others should not hide himself but do his best to come out into the world. ‘Raise up your light high’, it is said. All that is in you should be brought out, and if the conditions hinder you, break through the conditions! That is the strength of life.

You are love — you come from love — you are made by love — you cannot cease to love.

from The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Volume XIV, Love

Life is a journey, and the quality of one’s life depends upon the quality of the journey. And the quality of the journey is reflected in one’s response to the present moment. If one responds to the present moment in a heartful manner, radiating loving kindness and overflowing with selfless generosity, then blissful contentment, perfection and tranquility are found everywhere, regardless of the situations along the way.

He who is really happy is happy everywhere, in a palace or in a cottage, in riches or in poverty, for he has discovered the fountain of happiness which is situated in his own heart. As long as a person has not found that fountain, nothing will give him real happiness.

from The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, Volume VI, The Alchemy of Happiness

A source of happiness, or unhappiness, all is in man himself. When he is unaware of this, then he is not able to arrange his life, and as he becomes more acquainted with this secret he gains a mastery, and it is the process with which this mastery is attained which is the only fulfillment of this life.

from Sangatheka II, Number 30, Attar, by Hazrat Inayat Khan (unpublished)

with love,
wahiduddin