The Staff of Mindfulness

Long, long before smart phones, a walking stick was our support staff when on-the-go.  A good walking staff was the ultimate assistive device.  If you missteped, the staff helped regain your balance.  If tired, the staff was there to support you.  The staff offered the benefit of a probe if you needed to explore an unfamiliar object along the way.  It could be used as a gauge to test the depth of water if you had to ford a stream.  If you needed to commit something to memory, you could notch the information down on the staff more or less with same ease as we do it with flash-drive memory sticks of today.  And if necessary, a staff could be readily transformed into a weapon.  All in all, the staff helped clear the way from the obstacles.

Whereas acceptance of the ordinary perfection of what is is the destination of our walk, mindfulness – metaphorically speaking - is your walking staff.  Mindfulness – as an assistive psychological device – will help you traverse the turbulent streams of your consciousness; it will prop you up when you stumble over some imperfection; it will help you remember what you are and what you are not; it will clear away the debris of illusions on your way to wellbeing. 

Mindfulness is not only a kind of psychological walking staff, but it’s also a source of direction.  In my experience, most of the enduring self-help insights come directly from the experience of mindfulness.  I believe the entire human civilization as we know it began with mindfulness.  First, living in the jungle of life, we were too busy surviving to sit down.  When we finally figured out how to use fire to protect us, we got a chance to relax.  When we sat down in a circle around the first fire, for the first time in the history of our species with nothing to do, we noticed ourselves and our Selves.  We noticed the fire dance of our mortal impermanence and the circular interdependence of us all.  This was our first zazen, our first sitting meditation, our first species-wide experience of mindfulness, the dawn of self-awareness.  Some of us got immediately spooked by the realization of our impermanence and interdependence and psychologically separated ourselves from this all.  This separation, these I-you, me-it, self-other, subject-object, mind-body, man-nature distinctions led to dualism.  As soon as we separated ourselves from reality, we started trying to control it, improve it, and perfect it.  Having inevitably failed, instead of accepting our limitations, we chose to transcend them, we started to strive: perfectionism was born.  While we ran from ourselves and our Selves, there were always others who stayed seated, transfixed and inspired by the fire dance of impermanence.  It is from these “baby-sitters” (monks, mystics, meditators, introspectors, hermits, and "inner-nauts") of our primordial consciousness that we all have been trying to re-learn how to be a human being, not a human doing.

Mindfulness – as a special kind of awareness - involves two essential mechanisms:  1) passive attention, and 2) dis-identification.   Attention can be active or passive, that of an active observer and that of an uninvolved witness.  This distinction is easy to understand through the contrast of such verbs as “to look” and “to see.”  “To look” implies an active visual scanning, a kind of goal-oriented visual activity.  “To see” implies nothing other than a fact of visual registration.  Say, I lost my house keys.  I would have to look for them.  But in the process of looking for my house keys, I might also happen to see an old concert ticket.  Mindfulness is about seeing, not looking.  It is about “just” noticing and “just” witnessing without an attachment or identification with what is being noticed and witnessed.  But how do you do this mindfulness thing?  By not doing it, by adopting what James Austin, a professor emeritus of neurology and the author of “Zen and the Brain,” calls the riverbank attitude: “It is a letting go of oneself, of letting things happen, of not striving.  This means not trying to do something.  It also means not trying not to do something.  Finally, a state beyond trying arrives.” (Austin, p. 142).  “A state beyond trying” – a state beyond striving, beyond craving, beyond seeking, beyond reaching- is a state beyond perfectionism.