Today we open the biggest can of worms in modern meditation: mindfulness.
mindfulness seems to mean anything you want
This one term has lost its original ground, which is to say, it’s being used for far too many things, while not really meaning most of those things. It does mean some things, but it doesn’t mean everything marketers are trying to make it mean.
even meditators don’t agree
Remember how we talked about the word “meditation” going through a process of meaning one thing and then another thing, and now just about everything? Mindfulness is in the same situation.
It is so overused in meditation circles that practitioners of one tradition may mean something almost unrecognizable to what practitioners from other traditions mean.
For example, the popular Vipassana community doesn’t mean the same thing that the ancient Mahamudra traditions do when they use the term mindfulness. And no traditional Indian texts share the psychologist-approved modern meanings taught to corporations. We have had a bit of a communication breakdown.
and then there’s the marketers
But it’s not just within meditation, now there are fad movements in every sellable niche from business to sex to weight loss operating behind the word mindfulness.
You don’t know what someone means when they say this word anymore. Their “mindfulness” — what is it? Is it meditation? Probably not. Maybe it’s self-help, or their life-hack toward minimalism, or decluttering, or making money in a more “sustainable” way.
All this tries to live inside one word. We’ve been here before.
If you walked the aisle of bookstores in the 1980s, you saw the same thing happening to the word Tao. First, tao meant the central conception of the Chinese tradition, Taoism. Then, for some reason, it caught on and became a fad. Then it meant “the word you put on a book jacket to sell your scheme.”
By the 1990s tao had as much to do with finding your edge in Wall Street as it did anything deep. Then, as all things eventually must, it was pulled into books on sex. The tao of sex.
Mindfulness is next in line, if not already there. It can join the ranks of once-meaningful words pulled through the mill, from weight loss to moneymaking, to sex: tantra, yoga, chakra, etc.
Ok, enough of that.
despite all this, it’s an important word
Keeping to our mission, let’s talk about mindfulness only in the context of meditation.
And also in keeping to our mission, let’s reiterate our terms. First, our definition of meditation:
Mindfulness has at least two very different definitions in meditation instruction. Let’s take a look, because they are both very helpful. They are two very good meanings that make a big difference in the practice of freeing ourselves from fear and confusion.
First things first: where’s the word come from? India.
The word mindfulness goes all the way back to ancient Indian literature and beyond. There you find two vital words each translated as “mindfulness.” Smrti, and sati. That first word looks hard to pronounce. But it’s actually easy: “smree-tee”. Said quickly, like “T.V.” Go ahead: give it a try.
Did you do it? If so, you just spoke one of the most impactful words in human spirituality. Smrti has been in continuous use for 4000 years. Think about that. It’s been used in the same way all that time. And we just used it here, in 2024.
4000 years? Wow — that’s when you know a word must mean something important.
The other word, sati, is still very old, but came later. It means the same thing, and lots of meditators use it instead of smrti.
These two words are from slightly different dialects of ancient India: Sanskrit (smrti) and Pali (sati). Both are major resources for meditative literature. That’s it for today’s history and linguistic lesson. Let’s dive into the meaning.
mindfulness in translation
There are no popular contenders to the word mindfulness, it’s what nearly every translator uses, so we’ll use it too.. Amazingly, I have no quarrel with it. It’s a good old English word going back to the 1500s (“myndfulness”), and it actually does a great job of putting the original Sanskrit meaning into English. Sometimes things work out!
Indian meditators didn’t use the term mindfulness, because it didn’t exist yet, because English didn’t exist yet. And it wasn’t pressed into meaning “meditation” until 100 years ago, after which it lost much of its original identity. It had 400 years to be a good English word before it was taken over by the need to translate Sanskrit. These days, you hear the phrase “mind the gap” on the Tube in London. That preserves some of the original meaning, and also bridges into the ancient Indian meaning too. That’s part of what makes it such a good translation.
But if only it were that simple. Here’s where the controversy comes in.
plot thickens, gets interesting
Historically, mindfulness (smrti/sati) implied keeping in mind the essential teachings of the path: the understanding of impermanence, nonself, and so forth. Mindfulness meant, at least in part, to maintain a relationship to this understanding.
And that means mindfulness keeps information in mind. It retains stuff. It has to, right? How else is it going to be “mindful” of something it learned? I want my doctor to be mindful of anatomy when they poke me. They need to remember that my arm and my eyeball are two different things.
But things changed: a modern turn has removed the stuff altogether, and argued that mindfulness is a type of bare attention on the present moment. In this use, there is no stuff, only the present moment into and out of which stuff comes and goes.
As you see, these two meanings are different, yet genuine traditions that pursue the same goal find ways to operate with the differences of meaning in this one word.
two camps, one campfire?
So now we have two competing meanings.
The original, basic word meant “memory” and was used by the Buddha to teach meditation. And the Buddha seems to have implied that mindfulness would include knowing things, keeping a wise outlook, not forgetting essential information. Just like a surgeon has some level of anatomy and technique in mind during a procedure, a meditator also is loaded up with training that is kept in mind even during meditation.
And now we have this modern interpretation, popular in recent meditation communities, where mindfulness signifies bare attention to the present moment.
Both share some things: In meditation, they often mean being collected rather than distracted, or present to what is actually here. Whether or not that collectedness includes information one tries to maintain, such as a meditation instruction or a teaching on reality, is up for debate.
But nobody is going to win that debate, the traditions are dug in where they stand.
This isn’t a big deal for us, it just means we have to recognize which meaning we are depending on in the type of meditation we’ve learned.
example: what I teach
I teach Finding Ground Meditation, which is my presentation of the Mahamudra system of India and Tibet. My teachers, and I along with them, use mindfulness in a specific way that simply means being attentive to one’s current state of being.
This simple way of talking about mindfulness works because we have a rich way of talking about other parts of meditation that some traditions don’t have. In other words, we have a rich vocabulary that doesn’t need to pack everything into one word. Mindfulness is an important part, but a somewhat smaller part, of our instructions. And that is notably different.
For some traditions, the practice is “mindfulness.” That’s it, that’s the whole thing. As in, “what do you practice” “I practice mindfulness.”
For other traditions, especially those with more ancient roots, mindfulness can mean the development of sustained attention in meditation, and it can also mean luminous awareness of the sensory and mental world. The meaning attributed to it within a tradition may shift as practice becomes more and more powerful and advanced instructions replace preliminary instructions. The “mindfulness” you begin with is transformed into a more potent, more effortless mindfulness later on. As you grow, so do the elements of your vocabulary.
Finding Ground Meditation follows the approach of a classical system. Here, “mindfulness” is an important part of the mind, and you need it to practice meditation. You begin meditation by developing mindfulness, and then you graduate to a deeper type of mindfulness,— an effortless style of maintaining awareness.
putting it all together
At first, meditation reverses the damage done by having weak mindfulness, which accomplishes a level of healing, making us fit for a further journey. When the healing is underway, some traditions of meditation transition the emphasis from mindfulness to awareness. Finding Ground, along with Mahamudra and other awareness based traditions, does this.
We mentioned yesterday that whereas mind is the part of us that knows the things in the world, awareness is the part of us that knows ourself.
Awareness is a very subtle quality of our being, and training it through meditation accomplishes great things. Awareness is the domain of real transformation, and that’s what we’ll talk about next.
See you tomorrow!
Jeffrey