Getting our Mind around Mindfulness
The word “mindfulness” gets tossed around a lot these day, but nobody seems to be clear on what the “mind” actually is. So I really like Ajahn Sucitto’s reflections on this in his recent talk, Mindfulness and Experiencing a Living Being. (Which is described by whoever put the talk on line as: “A truly excellent exploration of mindfulness, what it’s about, and how to get our minds around it.”)
Sucitto says:
“Mindfulness…sati [in Pali]…is the particular quality of mind that causes one to remember, causes a certain deepening, and then ‘uh-hu’…a kind of recognition… That’s the etymology of it. So, mindfulness is that which causes you to have an ‘un-hu’ moment. Where something is happening that lands, is referred to, and is felt. It touches, really touches the citta [mind-heart]. So the citta receives it. Gets a handle on it. Gets a feel for it…
“Mindfulness is not thoughtfulness, though thoughtfulness plays a part in it. It’s not attention, though attention has a part. It’s not fixed concentration.
“It’s: Mindfulness.
It’s bringing something to mind.
“So, what is ‘mind’?
“For many people ‘mind’ would seem to be the rational processes. That’s part of it. But that’s what Buddhists call ‘inner speech’.
The mind is something more like ‘heart’. It has emotion, but it’s a bit more than that. It has thought. It has intuition…imagination. It has sensitivity. It has stillness…presence.
“There is a gradation of qualities that we can experience, which would be held under the term ‘mind’. Including the kind of experiences that are not common to the everyday person — a sense of just: open, aware, with no thought — but very aware. For many people this is not a reference.
“But that’s ‘mind’. In fact, in Buddhist understanding, that’s the clearest, most accurate description of mind: sensitive, open, with no particular content — but able to handle content, if content arises. That would be considered to be the optimal ‘mind’.
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I don’t know about you, but this blows my mind. (And that’s just the first five minutes of the talk!) Click here to listen to it all.