Socrates said, “The
unexamined life is not worth living.” Buddha likened our normal, everyday
awareness to being asleep. Vedanta teaches that the world presented to us by
our senses and framed by our conceptual thought is an illusory portrait called maya. And in his letter to the
Corinthians Paul said that “we see through a glass, darkly.” For all its
boundless potential the mind limits us as much as it empowers us. As the Maitri
Upanishad says, our mind is a prison, but the mind is also our liberator.
There’s nothing “wrong” with our minds. A craftsman never
blames his tools. The breakdown comes in the manner in which our tools are
used.
Of all the academic disciplines philosophy is the one
most specifically charged with the task of thinking about thinking – an
inherently problematic task. Using thought to examine the nature of thought is
like trying to see your own eyes – it’s hard because you use your eyes to see.
The American philosopher William James said that trying to understand
consciousness is like trying to understand the dark by turning on a light –
what you hope to examine is obliterated by the act of examination. That’s why
the Zen Buddhists counsel us to practice no-thinking,
an inelegant term for simple awareness. In contrast to ordinary thinking where
the phenomena of the world are run through a mediating filter of preconceived
judgments and conceptual structures, simple awareness sees the world as it
actually is.
The irony is this – it’s difficult to keep things simple.
As Zen practitioner and Apple founder Steve Jobs said, “Simple can be harder
than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it
simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there you can move
mountains.”
The mountain we have to move is our own monolithic,
over-wrought busy-mind. And the method that best moves that mountain is
mindfulness.
The Buddha left behind an eight step process for reducing
self-obsession and thereby reducing suffering known as the Noble Eightfold
Path. Item number seven is Right Mindfulness. It means gently monitoring and
shaping mental content. Simply put it means paying attention. Really paying
attention.
Mindfulness means coming out of the fog of past and
future thinking. Mindfulness means dropping the habit of endlessly comparing,
judging, craving, and pushing away. Mindfulness means coming out of the
agitation of the thought-stream and settling into the serenity of boundless
awareness. Instead of fighting anything and everything you move into simple
acceptance of what is.
The practice of mindfulness may be thousands of years
old, but in the modern era it came into prominence largely through the efforts
of one man, Boston professor of medicine and Buddhist practitioner John Kabat-Zin.
After being introduced to Zen Buddhism by renowned
teacher Philip Kapleau, Kabat-Zin went on to found the Stress Reduction Clinic
and later the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at
the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In a brilliant move, he dropped
mindfulness meditation’s explicit association with Buddhism and began to refer
to it simply as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or MBSR. Buddhist
traditionalists weren’t pleased, but Kabat-Zin was right. By teaching thousands
of patients and health care professionals to quiet their thoughts and come into
present-awareness, he opened the door and changed forever the way the Western
medical tradition viewed pain management and the intimate link between
consciousness and physical health.
But it wasn’t until the publication of his
ground-breaking and perennially best-selling book Wherever You Go, There You Are in 1986 that Kabat-Zin took
mindfulness into the mainstream. Suddenly, millions of us were learning about
mindfulness.
Today there are mindfulness training classes in
elementary schools, prisons, sports teams, corporate executive retreats, and
medical facilities all over the world – even in Congress where it is perhaps needed
most.
A quick survey of the growing body of research around the
efficacy of mindfulness meditation shows that not only does mindfulness reduce
stress, it also bolsters the immune system. And the benefits don’t end there.
Cardiac recovery patients who practiced mindfulness meditation experienced a
41% reduction in mortality rates compared with those who did not. The
connection between mind and body has been irrefutably established.
But no one saw this coming. It’s one thing to experience
reduced stress and improved health as a result of the practice of mindfulness.
But now we’ve learned that the transformation goes much deeper. The regular
practice of mindfulness spurs the brain into building new neural pathways and
circuitry resulting in long-term, permanent benefit. When we give new shape to
our thoughts, we give new shape to our brains. And when we transform the
instrument with which we process the world, we change the world.
Twenty five centuries ago the Buddha said, “Our life is a
product of our thoughts. Our thoughts of yesterday shape our life of today, and
our thoughts today shape our life tomorrow. Our life is a product of our
thoughts.” We are learning more and more about how this is true. And more
importantly, we can learn to experience this for ourselves.
Take gratitude.
The decision to view one’s life through the lens of the
consciousness of gratitude instead of fear and scarcity has measurable
benefits. When we cultivate gratitude with practices like keeping a daily
gratitude journal we create new neural habits. The decision to focus one’s
attention on what one does have
instead of on what one does not have
reaps a harvest of well-being. Not one single thing in the outer world changes.
But the way in which one views the outer world will never be the same.
With the dawning of gratitude, a feeling of freedom and
joy gradually replaces the self-obsession, pain, and victim-consciousness so
many of us allow to fester in our lives. In the conscious practice of
mindfulness we learn a valuable lesson – we are the authors of our own
experience. This profoundly empowering insight emboldens us to drop our
self-serving narratives as beleaguered combatants and realize our unbreakable
communion with all that is. We no longer squander energy resisting what is but
instead gain energy by moving into accord with what is becoming. We no longer
fight with everyone and everything. We realize that there is no such thing as
private happiness, that your well-being and my well-being are one inextricable
whole. Our religious views shift, our ethical views shift, our political views
shift, and we begin making different decisions as spouses, neighbors,
consumers, and citizens.
By simplifying our minds we simplify
our lives. By simplifying our lives we come into immediate contact with the
essence of all that is. We are reconnected. We come back home to the vibrant
center of our own aliveness. No longer lost in the exile of the thought-stream,
we realize the simple truth – who we are and what we are is enough. And the
healing begins. 
