I had several blog posts on mindfulness, Here I have combined them to answer everything from its definition to practice. I also have given several links to related topics which helps in understanding mindfulness.
Everything you need to know about mindfulness in four steps
Step 1 Definition of mindfulness, what it is and what it is not.
Being aware of the awareness is the mindfulness.
This is the shortest, and closest and most complete definition of mindfulness that I have come across. And these are not my words. These are from great people who practice mindfulness daily. But as we all know having known the definition helps but not completely.
Being aware is not mindfulness.
Just being aware is not mindfulness. As nothing can be done without being aware. We are aware all the time we are not sleep. We work, walk, talk and roll in an emotional roller-coaster throughout the day. But can that be called being Mindful? And we know the answer.
But if you are aware of your awareness, then it is mindfulness by above definition. See the Suttle difference? Let's imagine you are a programmer. You are tired after six hours of work, and you are aware of your tiredness. That is not mindfulness. But if you see that you are observing your awareness of tiredness as a quantity itself. Then you are mindful. Mindfulness feels like a higher layer of awareness.
But what is the importance of knowing this?
It is obvious we are immediately starting actioning when we are faced by an emotion, like tiredness, love, greed, anger etc. That is if we are just aware. But if we are mindful of theses emotions, there is a gap between thoughts and actions. Instead of involved with these emotions, once they are objectified as things to be aware of, we naturally tend to get away from our impulsiveness.
I can write thousand benefits of being mindful. But this may not the time or the place. I suggest there are thousands of blogs have done the same before. So, I choose not to. However, I will give you another principle to help you with this.
That is,
Mindfulness without wisdom is like a blind goose.
That is true. You have read it correct. Mindfulness without wisdom is not going to go anywhere and it is going to do more harm than good. So, what is wisdom? Wisdom is the information we receive to guide our mindfulness with. I have given you some wisdom. here in this article. But there is lot more. Wisdom is shaped by our information. So, if you are prejudiced by your culture or religion, I suggest you go in front of a mountain and be mindful until your ego drops down to earth and, then mindfulness will take over. And it will generate wisdom.
As information is always out there, whenever you hear or see or smell something.
Now knowing the definition of mindfulness, we will move onto mental objects. Essentially in mindfulness we are being aware of mental objects, awareness is also a mental objects. what are the characteristics of these mental objects?
Step 2 On Mental objects and their characteristics.
Let's talk about objects of mind. Let's not go into deep theorems of philosophy. Let's try to understand our objects of mind in a simple manner so we can have a good model of what is happening inside out.
First to explain and identify mental objects we will do a thought experiment! Hang on it's going to be fun.
As per the example, imagine you are looking at a flower. When you turn your eyes, you see a flower right? Now imagine you are a newborn baby and forget everything what you have learned so far. You are seeing the world for the first time. Now, let's look at the flower. What do you see? Do you see a flower?
Do you agree there is no flower if you remove layers of knowledge?
Now, do you agree yourself now, and yourself as a newborn baby both saw the same thing? But for the baby, there was no flower, maybe there were some colors. But for the baby there was only some light, which was present. (We really do not know it was even colors)
It seems that the things we have learned since our birth, has influenced markedly on what we see. Essentially it has made a world around us with our own imagination added to the layer of just mere colors, sensations and sounds.
I will give some characteristics of these mental objects .
Mental objects are unique to each and every individual.
We cannot access the world or communicate with the world without these mental objects.
Our values are almost always associated with these mental objects as we are communicating with the world through them
Mental objects change over time.
At one point of time our mind can only access only one object
I will discuss the characteristics one by one. And the importance and application of each. As a start here I will show that how mental objects are unique to each and every individual.
Imagine a family of five, father, mother, son his wife and a grandson. Imagine yourself as each one of them and think about following,
father will see himslef as -> me
mother will see father as -> husband
son will see father as -> father
daughter in law will see -> father in law
grandson will see -> grandfather
Do you see that all of them are talking about same person? Yet for each one of them the mental object of essentially same person, is markedly different. Even you have your own imagination about this father, and I am 100% sure it is different from mine.
Who is correct?
I can answer this question (who is correct ?) in half a day or in a half a sentence. But I will answer it in half a sentence to keep the post shorter.
Everyone is correct but only in their own relative world.
More importantly Let's discuss the importance of knowing, these mental objects which are different for each one of us.
A flower that is beautiful to you may not be necessarily beautiful to another. A loss that is not painful to you maybe very painful to another. Have some empathy and understand and believing what they are saying is true is the only way we can understand what they are experiencing.
Do not go into arguments by observing something from just your point of view. Someone else with more background knowledge may have a better understanding and point of view. After all, only you know nobody is exactly correct as we can never know what is really out there except through our own copy of mental objects !
Step 3 understanding Values.
This article is a follow up to the Objects of mind mental representation, where I have discussed some of the characteristics of mental objects. Here I will try to understand how our values are generated.
Following is a poem about our values.
Happiness Quantifiers - from the book what is time.
We are in the land of Quantifiers they shouted,
We measure our distances, we measure our weights,
We measure our time, and we measure our speeds,
We measure our heat, and we measure our energies.
And when we get together, we talk about our measurements.
We talk about the speeds of our cars.
We chat about the calories we consume.
We argue about the wages we are paid.
We fight about the boundaries and land.
We laugh about pink and white dresses.
And we teach our children to measure on their own.
That's all what we do.
If you have followed the thought process of mental objects, previously I have discussed everything which comes to our consciousness is represented by our mind by mental objects. Same physical object is represented by different mental imaginary by different people in deferent ways. More importantly our values are attached to the mental objects. You would say, no, our values are in the physical object itself. Let's understand this.
Example of values of mental objects
Imagine you are trying to sell your car. You are the first owner of the car. You try to sell it for good money; however, nobody wants to buy it. After few months of trying, you give up. You give up to a salesperson to some relatively low price than you have initially imagined. You think it is worth more than that and it is surely.
Few months later you see your car outside a shopping complex, and you meet the new owner. With a casual talk without telling anything, you ask how much he pay for the car. And he gives a value which rolls your eyes. Shamefully you go away thinking you missed the opportunity to earn some more cash. What happened?
It happened as the price was not in the car, the price was attached to the mental object of the car. Really speaking there is a branch of finance which is called behavioral finance as the real-world decisions we make are inherently attached to the values of our mental objects. Not only in finance, but we can also generalize this idea to any other value given to mental objects, if you closely think about it, whenever we create a mental object, we give a price tag to it. It may be a religion, mathematic equation, a goal for next year, a relationship or friendship.
The following characteristics of mental objects are also applicable to these price tags naming,
values are unique to each individual.
values change over time.
What is the Advantage of knowing this?
I would say it is essential to understand where our values come from as each and every action and decision making, every and gain and loss in our lives come from values we assign. Hence the happiness as well as sadness, pain and pleasure inherently bound to the values. Anyone who wish to live a mindful life, this information may help to overcome some of the problems if not all.
Step 4. How to Practice mindfulness - Looking at defilements.
If you asked me how to practice mindfulness. I would definitely say I would not give you set of instructions to follow. I am not capable of doing it as I am still a humble student of the great wisdom. Then you would think what the point if so, writing this article. I would say, 'wait- listen -my friend- I know I am not capable, but I know people who are capable. And this is the link to such a simple and complete guide to mindfulness.
First for you who do not like to read beyond this point check out the link. It is a great guide by Ashin Tejaniya who has practiced and prepared the guide for people who are interested. You can download the PDF guide and follow it in your own time.
Once one of my teachers said, there are two kinds of knowledge. One type of knowledge you memorize. Other type of knowledge you memorize where to find. In essence these second type of knowledge we do not use routinely and yet we know, where to find if such a need occurred in the future. Above book by Ashin Tejaniya was a one such book I kept in my mind that I needed to access when I have time. So, keep it in your memory if you think one day you would start thinking about food for your mind to have a look.
Here I will summarize few concepts presented in this book.
Mindfulness practice presented in the book is not to be done one specific time of the day but throughout the life.
It should be effortless and relaxed.
Objective is to observe the mind without judgement. (judgements are defilements or values we give to mental objects)
If there is stress and pain, doing this, something is wrong with the method.
Such smooth mindfulness should gain momentum over time.
In the land of thousand rivers, one day I walked onto a bridge. Alone, by myself. I can still picture the green mountain tops and trees covering each bank of the river. Majestic tropical trees shading parts of the massive water which runs down the river. I can remember the clouds and the reflections of them on the water. I looked down below. Water from upstream flew downstream passing under the bridge. And I continued to look, second after second, minute after minute, I could see new water replacing old water, still flowing downstream. It was continuous. There was no end to it. And I know the bridge is still there, water would be still flowing, if I went back and look at it tonight. There is something similar about the mind that these great teachers try to teach us about. Maybe one day It will occur to me.
By writing about this wisdom, I have given you the power to change your mindfulness practice hoping it would help you the way it helped me.
In summary Everything you need to know about mindfulness
Mindfulness is being aware of the awareness.
In practicing mindfulness, we look at mental objects
Mental objects are tagged with values given by our own minds.
It is the values which gives problems, and practice of mindfulness is to see the process.
You may wonder what is the purpose of doing this? Apart from health benefits and mental stability. Of course there are plenty of advantages. But if you want to think more deeply following is a good article to read about.
Thank you for reading, everything you need to know about mindfulness.
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