Continuity of Mindfulness is a useful baseline for the serious pursuit of the ending of dukkha, which is nibbāna. I just want to note down a few points that arose in a recent conversation with friend Tejamitra about the common obstacles to its achievement, so as to provide some guidance to those seeking its establishment.
Mindfulness is intermittent for a number of reasons. This can be to do with wrong views about both the kind of effort involved, and the kind of attention. The wrong kind of both is apparent in the rather exclusive concentration which grasps at a particular and doesn’t let it go – it is artificially narrow and quite likely to result in strain. The organism cannot do this for very long, and will begin to associate mindfulness with aversion. The right kind of awareness is rather like the peripheral attentiveness when you are enjoying reading a book, or on a proper walk in the country. You are aware of the setup of the body, and something of the environment around you, even though your cognitive activity is crystallised around your reading matter, or on putting one foot in front of the other. There is always a lot of which we are aware that doesn’t give rise to conscious and verbal cognition. If we are unmindful, that is ignored and discounted. If we apply the wrong kind of narrow effort, we only see the book and associated mind-activity. If we are mindful, we have a continuous apprehension of our body and environment, enough to be getting on with. The effort, such as it is, is in not going to sleep with regard to that, in resting the gentle hand of attention upon its shoulder, and touching upon it, as opposed to grasping at it. Phenomena manifest quite naturally from their own side, so to speak, and you don’t have to make some special effort for mindfulness to be naturally and easily established. It can then become clear that something we are giving that extra concentrated attention (such as the book) to is a sub-activity within the sphere of our mindfulness, but is in itself neither here nor there as regards what mindfulness actually is.
Mindfulness is not therefore cognitive omniscience. Omniscience is nonsense (which facts would count?), and the cognition of much of what is going on in the environment is not relevant to the ending of suffering. So how is mindfulness continually relevant to that end? The Mahasatipatthana Sutta is the great teaching on mindfulness, and it begins with the body. The body is continuously available, and what’s more is a great sensitive antenna for our relationship with Reality. The dukkha of which the releasing is nibbāna is expressed directly in the immediate life of the body. One can without much difficulty express the Path in terms of turning toward and releasing the dukkha that is found there. By remaining mindful, we meet what arises at source, and take responsibility before it flowers into unhelpful speech and actions. We can develop confidence in self-reliance, in being with our experience rather than running from it. We become nourished by the intimacy of it, and cease our anxiety and fretting. We pacify experiences of dukkha on their own ground, and break the cycle of suffering. We thereby experience increasingly liberated states of mind and being. I can say more in future about some of the details of this function of mindfulness, but have sketched out here the way in which mindfulness is often broken by our unwillingness to be with ourselves.
It is worth appreciating that one should be wary of any culture, spiritual or otherwise, which believes that certain experiences (in this case, difficult ones…) should primarily be mediated by someone else, and that you are insufficient to exercise this compassion for yourselves. Actually one person cannot be fixed by another – no-one else can feel anything on your behalf, and no-one else can hand the insight that you need over to you ready-made. It is almost taboo in this day and age to say that the Buddha counselled self-reliance; but without it we are left with magic and devotion, and all the consequent hazards of projection. It is of the nature of awareness to meet and investigate dukkha compassionately (rather than skittering away from it), and by so doing arrive at freedom. Yes, one often fails to do this as well as one might want to initially; but don’t settle for sympathy & sharing instead as all that is possible. Serious practice requires a special toughness to swim against the usual habit of running from one’s experience, along with the requisite profound sensitivity to it. One sets one’s faith on’Yes, I can do this!’, while remaining tender, even ironic, about the ongoing humiliation of practice. Indeed, if sympathy is all that is offered as Dhamma, it can amount to misdirection. Kisa Gotami became Enlightened, not because of the Buddha’s sympathy, but because alongside her he directed her to the heart of her suffering. She was willing in the end to go that far in order to be free. If you too are willing, you too have the motive for the establishment of mindfulness.