Dear Friends, I thought it would be interesting to post here a brief excerp from a book I am currently working on. I am interested because this is for the most part a non-Theravada group. You reactions would be of interest to me. So don't hold back. I don't promise I will agree with you, but I am interested in what you think, or more precisely, how what I say here corresponds to my own experience. Thanks, Daniel Three Western Myths About Mindfulness
Three myths about mindfulness are frequently found western Theravada circles. Beginning to intermediate students will often hold these assumptions, sometimes even advanced students, having carried them over from new age culture or watered down versions of culturally popular meditation practices. For many aspirants, these beliefs lie unseen within the mind, lost in memory, and become unrecognized sources of doubt and opinion regarding the practice of satipatthana vipassana. Choiceless Awareness is the "Purest" Practice of Mindfulness Attention is a process entirely conditioned by sensory input and the inner forces of desire, fear, restlessness and aversion, no matter now hidden they may seem to be. To accept a myth of choiceless awareness indicates that one has not grasped the truths associated with the second stage of vipassana insight, Knowledge of Conditionality. In reality choiceless awareness is conditioned attention, whose conditioning is goes unoticed. Allowing one's attention to float free in this way will make three things particularly difficult: the development of concentration, insight into intention, and the development of effort and energy. When practice is mature in Knowledge of Equanimity, a kind of choiceless awareness becomes possible, in that the illusion of the one who attends is now absent, but at that point the mind is very developed and will not be hindered or deluded by its own act of letting go. The path along which our mind must evolve to come upon the experience of the Unconditioned is quite narrow and precise. The ability to discover this precise point of balance in the development of the mind's faculties is what made the Buddha so unique. There is no room in this process for personal predilections or intellectual prejudice. To be successful in this path we must train our attention so as to achieve the necessary balance and development of the faculties. There may indeed be more than one system of practice for achieving this, yet every such successful system will be discovered to be balanced within itself. However, even then, all practice methods must be regularly "tweaked" to insure that progress remains on course. In the end, it is not the method itself that achieves the goal, but the carefully balanced evolution of the faculties that leads the mind to emergence. This precision requires refined tuning, something that does not easily evolve from free-floating awareness. Non-conceptual Awareness is the Goal of Mindfulness The conclusion to this logic is that the silent witnessing mind is superior to the use of mental notation. For fuller explanation on the benefits of mental notation, please refer to my dedicated chapter on this subject. Conception and preception are so intimately merged that we cannot separate them, although we can come to distinguish them. Those who pretend that awareness is non-conceptual are lost in their own concepts about practice and are far from seeing the present reality of their minds. In ordinary life, the closest we come to non-conceptual awareness is in deep sleep, or when we see something in the distance that we do not recognize, or when we encounter some new object completely unknown and mysterious to us. However, even those last two examples, the mind is busily applying the closest approximate concepts to try and "figure it out." Additionally, yogis can experience non-conceptual awareness during their practice in that tiny space between sensory impingement and mental recognition. Concepts are not the enemy. The enemy is that confusion of mind that cannot distinguish between the two dimensions of conception and perception present in our moment-to-moment cognition. It is this confusion that hides the true nature of both, and not the presence of concepts in the mind, which are inevitable and almost constantly present. Mindfulness Only Reveals What Is A common mistake made by many dedicated practitioners of satipathana or other forms of mindfulness as found in various schools of Buddhism, is to believe that mindfulness only reveals what is without altering how things appear to consciousness. Mindfulness is not a passive process. It radically changes the way the mind experiences its reality. We cannot claim therefore that we are merely allowing reality to reveal itself. Because the perceptions, insights and states of consciousness that arise in practice are conditioned by the development of the five controlling faculties, the jhana factors and the seven factors of enlightenment, we cannot say that we are accessing the reality of the five aggregates as they really are in their own objective sphere or even as they would appear in some hypothetical state of subjective super clarity. Satipathana practice is definitely a system of mental development engaging and affecting the mind in many ways and on many levels. All we can say is that mindfulness reveals reality as experienced by a mind properly developed in such a way as to experience freedom from greed, hatred and delusion. The absence of delusion means something very precise: the successful oppositing of the four vipalasas, or distortions of subjective perception. There are the vipalasa that sees the impermanent as permanent, the vipalasa that sees the dissatisfactory as satisfactory, the vipalasa that sees a self in what which is no-self, and the vipalasa that sees the repulsive as delightful.
