The adventure of mindfulness without meditation.
Are you looking for meditation the practice or the state of mind?
Yesterday I wrote that “by describing how <anything> works, we can discover how to improve it”. And for explaining the working dynamics, we need to reduce our <anything> to its the basics parts. So I thought, to keep testing that ‘theory’ I’ll try with something difficult: Meditation, empty mind/no mind, mindfulness… “All of that”, what is what and who is who.
It’s always a good start to “dump” some big questions. Not for answering them, but as openers of thought:
- Is meditation the practice or the state of mind?
- Do I need to meditate to go to a meditative state? How else could I “get there”?
- Is the practice of meditation for getting good at meditating or to feel good/relaxed/enlightened, or what instead?
- After all, what is the real value of being present or mindful?
- Is meditation a being or a doing thing?
Are you looking for meditation the practice or the state of mind?
To eat something sweet, do I need to drive to the store and buy a peach ice-cream or can I eat the peach I have alredy in my garden?
If meditation is the way to get more present, to get more “Me” and less “my thoughts”; Isn’t it like calling a taxi to go from here to here?
Is Yoga the connection body-mind-spirit or the physical training for physical conditioning that also includes the mind?
Meditation as Being or Doing
As Being: a mental state, or a silent mind, or no-mind.
As Doing: a practice, a technique or goal-oriented activity.
Meditation is a mental state, or further, a non-intellectual understanding. Meditation is also a practice, while useful and effective, not necessary to a state of meditation.
Bottom line, It seems there are both: the practice to get to the state of meditation and the state of meditation. One doesn't “need” the other.
Let’s get to the Meditative state:
Syd Banks defined the state of meditation as a Silent mind and a beautiful feeling. The silent mind is the space where the noise comes and goes. It could mean that the silent mind is our mind being aware of our thoughts.
Usually, we confuse our thoughts as “THE reality” while they are our experience, at most.
Thoughts are just that, thoughts. It doesn’t mean they are true or false, real or unreal, they are thoughts. If we could really see that distinction, then we could get to choose which thought to think, right.
What if you would act only on the positive thoughts and ignore the bad thoughts? How would then “reality” look like?
A beautiful metaphor for the state of meditation could be “the sky”: there could be clouds, birds, rain, sun, the moon, and the stars. Even if it looks very different depending on the elements (thoughts) that appear on it, the sky never really changes — whether raining, full of birds, day or night.
Syd Banks described Mindfulness as pure consciousness with no contamination from our personal thinking.
There could be thoughts passing through the sky, but when in a state of meditation, we dont confuse the thoughts as to be the sky.
Michael Neill said that “Staying in the state of meditation is a space where we can see and hear our own wisdom”. Like a pool, where all we need to know is written at the bottom of it; to read it, we need to be outside the pool.
Nice, but… Why is it so hard in the practice: introducing Monkey Mind.
The continuous chain of thoughts called the monkey mind is continuously generating thoughts. Our mind considers those thoughts as information. The “monkey mind” will generate information in lieu of receiving it from the environment. Then is when get cut-off from the experience.
Making that space between our thoughts and the environment might be the sweet space of meditation.
Where we choose to put our attention?
According to Ellen Langer, it is either in one or the other: Thought or Experince. She call those choices Mindful or mindless. Thoughts and certainty are mindless; State of meditation is mindful.
What is MindLess, and what is MindFulness?
Mindless: An inactive state of mind characterized by reliance on distinctions (Langer). Categories are drawn from the past:
1. The past over-determines the present
2. Trapped in a single perspective
3. Insensitive to context
4. Rule and routine governed; look at general patterns and assume they project into the future.
5. Confuse the stability of our mindsets with the stability of the underlying phenomena
Mindfulness: Its an active state of mind characterized by noticing new things, novel distinctions drawing that results in…:
1. …being situated in the present
2. …being sensitive to context and perspective
3. …being aware of rule and routine guidance; questioning them
4. …phenomenological experience of engagement, connected to moment.
5. …mindful noticing, which reveals uncertainty,
6. which leads to more noticing (Langer, 2013)
Uff… lets recap:
Practices of meditation are practices of contemplative training to get fit at accessing a meditative state. The mental state we have moment to moment could be EITHER mindless or mindful. It Is 100% one or the other. The state of meditation is a mindful state, where we experience rather than think.
Practicing meditation could help and train us to be mindful, but you can also just be there. Dont need to go buy a peach ice cream; you can directly eat the peach.
We dont need to go to any place; we are already “here”. Beware of your thoughts, though.
You’re always only one thought away from happiness; you’re only one thought away from sadness. The secret lies in thought.
Use the pool metaphor (where thoughts are the water) to read the bottom of the pool. Dont be In the pool but outside to read your answers; as make space out of your thoughts. Or, use the sky metaphor: seeing the sky and the birds. Knowing that the sky is your meditative/mindful state, AND the birds (and everything else appearing) are elements performing on it, alias your thoughts.
The birds and stars are not the sky; they appear in the sky.
You only one thought away from….!?