So next week will be.
Delving into the four foundations of mindfulness.
And.
.
.
I want to introduce this map of mindfulness by exploring the Buddha's final instruction.
In the canon,
It says,
Be a island unto yourself or be a light unto yourself.
Be your own refuge with no other refuge.
Let the Dharma or the Dharma,
However you want to pronounce it,
Be your island.
Let the Dharma be your refuge with no other refuge.
So how do we become our own refuge?
How do we be a light unto ourselves?
The answer that I've experienced directly is mindfulness.
But what exactly is mindfulness?
You know,
Many practitioners have been exposed to the popular definition of mindfulness.
Often it's incomplete.
We hear that mindfulness means being present and paying attention.
Reducing stress and calming down and staying in the moment or relaxing.
And those may be consequences of mindfulness.
But they're not mindfulness itself.
You know,
The Buddha's instruction.
Is not.
A celebration of self-reliance?
In the modern sense,
Rather he's pointing towards the capacity to see clearly.
To know for ourselves,
To investigate experience directly,
And to discover in our investigation what leads to suffering and what leads to freedom.
So it's really important to understand.
That the essence of the mindfulness practice.
Is that it's a methodology for freedom.
That's why we're practicing.
Let me be clear,
It's not the freedom.
To buy more stuff or do whatever you want whenever you want to do it.
Freedom in Buddhism is not the freedom to do whatever you want.
It's more like freedom from.
Freedom from that compulsion.
Freedom from that inner restriction.
That force and that drive to pursue the next desire.
Freedom from our animosities,
The things that we hate and don't like.
That have us caught in fearing.
Mindfulness,
As a practice,
Is simply knowing the state of your mind.
In this moment.
Without judging it or evaluating it or trying to change it.
Knowing your emotional state in this moment.
Is there joy?
Is there sorrow?
Loneliness,
This is mindfulness.
And it's important because how we perceive and frame each moment.
It generates our reality.
So the quality of your mind determines the quality of your life.
When we're practicing formal meditation like we just did.
We use mental noting as a tool.
You know,
Noting boredom,
Noting thinking,
Noting a lot of thinking,
Noting fantasy,
Noting memory.
And that note is mindfulness.
Noting the state of your mind moment by moment.
And when we get caught,
Where mindfulness gets kind of murky,
Is when we note,
Let's say,
Boredom.
And then we add a whole story.
Of why.
We add the content and the perception and the feeling and the view.
And if we're not aware of adding all of this other content,
What happens is that we are run by it.
Brandeis.
You know,
I think it's very rare.
That we ask ourselves,
Well,
What?
What is a thought?
Like,
What is a thought?
Like,
Really?
You know,
When I'm practicing meditation and I get lost in thought and then come back to my body and my breath and then try to recall the thought.
I can't do it.
Because thinking.
.
.
Thinking is kind of like energy wisps in the mind.
It's like wind.
It comes and it goes and it's so insubstantial.
But when we're not aware,
That we're thinking.
Thoughts have such power in our lives.
They're like these little dictators.
Have you noticed?
Do this.
Do that.
Get married.
Get divorced.
Move.
Change.
Thoughts are like running the show.
They're running our lives.
And their energy wisps in the mind.
Wind.
So even just kind of considering.
The question,
What is the thought?
Not the content or the story.
And then like considering that.
We can see.
.
.
That there's not much there.
And seeing this repeatedly.
It really begins to free us from being so dominated by this mental activity of thinking.
But first we have to see it.
And we have to see it over and over again.
So we can be.
Practicing and observing our experience,
We're present,
We're knowing what's happening.
But another part of mindfulness is knowing that we're experiencing everything through various filters in the mind.
It might be the filter of wanting,
Wanting or desiring something.
Or it might be the filter of aversion.
Or resistance.
Or kind of the filter of delusion,
Which is more like a fog or confusion.
I don't know what to do.
You know,
That type of thing.
So getting to know the way we're filtering experience.
Is really getting to know how we feed experience.
So that the effect of these different mind states.
These are the filters.
So part of mindfulness practice is starting to really become aware of how these filters are operating.
And one way that I learned to do this was to ask the question,
What is the attitude in the mind?
Or what is the mood.
So when we ask,
What is the attitude of the mind?
That will focus us on whether there's a filter or not.
Just asking the question allows sometimes for us to relax back into mindfulness.
There's an important principle that we often need to hear.
Again and again.
And again.
In this practice that we do and it and it's that it really doesn't matter.
What the experience is that we're having.
What matters is how we are relating to the experience.
That's what we're practicing.
We're not practicing for a particular experience.
Because experience.
Is just arising as part of sort of the passing show.
Of this life.
The liberating practice of mindfulness is not about what experience is happening.
It's how we are relating to it.
How are we relating to what's happening?
So why is mindfulness?
The Buddha defined it not by talking about a singular term.
Like a particular mental faculty,
But he defined it as a set of practices.
That work together in a coordinated way.
And that's the presentation.
Of the four foundations of mindfulness.
So the four places that we establish Attention.
Establish mindfulness.
And these four areas that we will be exploring in depth.
The first is the body.
The second is feelings or feeling tones.
The third is mind states.
The moods.
And the fourth he called the Dhammas,
Which translates more to like the patterns or the truths that govern experience.
So over the coming weeks,
We'll explore each of these foundations in greater depth.
But for now.
.
.
It may be enough simply to remember this.
When the Buddha told us to be a refuge unto ourselves,
He was not telling us to trust our conditioning.
Or trust our preferences.
He wasn't telling us to trust our opinions or our views.
He was inviting us to simply trust awareness.
The capacity to observe carefully.
The wisdom that emerges naturally when we start seeing things clearly.
And the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.
They're the training that makes the singing possible.
30.
Really the practical expression of becoming a light unto ourselves.
So I'll stop here and.
.
.
Take your questions or comments or if you'd like to refute me,
That's also welcome.
Thank you.
