Being Mindful is Optimal

Being Aware is Just Plain Degrading

            I came across a quote from Sylvia Boorstein on a thought-for-the-day posting: “Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.” I take it that certain people reading this statement find it uplifting, illuminating, and quite appealing. I find such statements problematic.

            But what is this practice of mindfulness (without all the fluff)? At its core it is the attempt to be aware of something one is instructed to be aware of. If one is instructed to be aware of eating, for example, it is the attempt to notice all the phases of eating: tasting, chewing, swallowing, etc. But not only that—one is also to be engaged in the experience of eating. That is, one’s mind should not wander from what one is doing. The practitioner is thus instructed to do two basic things with her attention: 1) Be in the experience, and 2) Notice the experience. This is prescribed for all kinds of experiences, except for thoughts, where “being in the experience” is not recommended.

            Mindfulness, as a method, cannot work with thinking. It is a doomed direction because we cannot be aware of thinking without being in it, and being in it is not being mindful. I believe you have to cultivate the capacity of awareness from within the experience of thinking; however, it can’t be something you add on to it like the notion of detaching yourself from your thoughts and being a pure observer of them, which is the general direction mindfulness teachings have adopted.

           Now, you may wonder why you can’t detach yourself from your thoughts and observe them as they are. It is because by trying to detach yourself from them, you are changing the way your thoughts are. Your thinking becomes unnatural. And you will tend to think about your thinking, believing that you are just observing it, not noticing how the observer’s thought process becomes the dominant form of thinking. This also goes against the notion of a pure witnessing awareness that can somehow be detached from thoughts—only in certain states of mind does that appear to be so, but even when that happens, there can periods of thinking in words and images. To go into those kinds of meditative states is beyond the scope of this article. It is worth noting here that I do not believe such states adequately address the question of how to become aware of thoughts in meditation—in fact they tend to lead one in the direction of trying to find a particular optimal state of mind to be in so as to become aware of thoughts. Whereas in recollective awareness meditation practice, one allows thinking to continue as it is and does not attempt to detach from it. One becomes aware of thoughts mostly after the thinking has run its course. In this way recollective awareness practice is not about creating an optimal state of awareness, but rather staying with one's thoughts at the level of awareness present at the time of thinking, and adding awareness of the whole thought process after the fact. This is a critical distinction to make regarding mindfulness and recollective awareness meditation.

            So, mindfulness is an optimal (“idealized”) form of awareness that does not lend itself to becoming aware of thoughts. I think most mindfulness teachers, in truth, would rather have it that way. It is much easier to teach a method of directed attention when you have a clear idea of what needs attention and what is to be avoided. Mindfulness can work for some people to help them develop awareness of sense impressions, but I would caution against its usefulness in developing awareness of the workings of the mind.

            Being aware of one’s thoughts through the allowing of thinking is not an optimal experience. In fact, it is rather degrading. You get dragged into the muck. Well, at least it looks and feels like muck, and you may feel more down than up while going through it, but it is your mind after all. It may well be that non-optimal (by that I mean, “non-idealized”) awareness does not look and feel like anything special—it doesn’t have such concepts as “balanced acceptance,” “non-judgment,” or “non-clinging” attached to it. But it may have a hint of curiosity, a touch of playfulness, a certain level of self-honest seriousness, and an emerging willingness to be open to what one would normally have avoided.