What is Mindfulness? by Shinzen Young

Author:Shinzen Young
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: buddhism, enlightenment, meditation, mindfulness
Publisher: Shinzen Young
Published: 2018-08-21T23:00:00+00:00

Good tuning

Concentration power

Hi-Def

Sensory Clarity

Low impedance

Equanimity

Heat

Unnecessary suffering

Energy waste

Your life vitality is dissipated through subtle,

subliminal self-interference

Blow fuse

Lose it, i.e., become overwhelmed by a subjective suffering or do something in the objective world that you later regret

Manufacturer

Natura sive deus (as Spinoza would have said)

Present Revisited: The Power of Absolute Now

Absolute Now 1: Thin Breath

Many people make breath focus the centerpiece of their mindfulness practice. There are advantages and disadvantages to that approach. An obvious advantage is simplicity. A possible disadvantage is failure to utilize one of the Buddha's key discoveries: the power of systematically untangling the skein of selfhood.

So does that mean that a practice purely devoted to the breath will fail to bring liberation or enlightenment? It depends. If one's primary goal in breath practice is merely concentration, then, yes, you could hit a cul-de-sac.

To get really deep results from breath practice, one typically needs to bring in clarity and equanimity factors. There are lots of ways to go about that. Let's explore one of them.

At the beginning of this section, I gave two examples of being present-centered based on selective attention to a specific category of sensory experience. The first involved focusing on everything other than thought. The second involved focusing on breath only. I mentioned in passing that some people might find the second approach a "tighter" experience of being in the present.

Is there a way to tighten the present-centeredness further, perhaps even to the razor's edge of Absolute Now? Let's consider.

There are many ways to focus on the breath. In the U Ba Khin tradition, one focuses on the tiny sensation of the breath going into and out of the nostrils. Clearly, this represents a contractive spatial focus. Does it also represent a contractive temporal focus? Yes, if a certain type of sensory clarity is brought into play.

Some people can distinguish two qualities of sensation created by the airstream through the nostrils. One quality is thick, coagulated and sort of ordinary. The other quality is paper thin, feather light— so subtle it's sort of there but not there. For convenience, let's call the former thick and the latter thin. The thin sensation is the actual, real-time touch (phassa) of the airstream. The thick sensation is a local reactive spread triggered by that touch.

Most anyone can detect the thick sensation. Some people develop enough clarity to detect the thin sensation and distinguish it from the microreactive thick sensation. In addition, one may have enough concentration to lock attention on that thin quality. This creates an extremely tight experience of being on the cutting edge of Absolute Now. Indeed, "cutting edge" is literally the traditional metaphor for this tight temporal focus. The airstream carries a sequence of tiny sensations that are traditionally compared to the teeth of a saw, each briefly touching the edge of the wood. Notice that concentration power is not the only factor involved in this example of presentness. Clarity is also needed to detect the thin sensation and distinguish it from the thick sensation, and clarity is needed to detect each tiny "tooth" as it touches the nostrils.

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