Mind is a little word for a big thing.
Meditation works with the mind. But in meditation cultures, mind means more than it means to non-meditation cultures like ours. See how their version of mind is more exciting.
If you’ve read the other posts in this series, you know my position that we have to be careful with our words, because the internet is full of variations for what everything means. I can’t get away from the term “meditation” because it is nearly universal. But when I use it, I use it in a specific way, as do my many teacher friends.
When we talk about meditation, we mean an inner practice of mind and awareness that releases us from fear and confusion.
Sometimes, this is phrased as “freedom from suffering” and I’m fine with that too, as long as we don’t get mired in the many, many things suffering can mean. Thus, fear and confusion is a better summary statement, according to my experience and training.
Read the whole series! Subscribe and get at it!
Terms are special words
When we start our journey into meditation we really need to know what things mean. If we don’t know what things mean, we pretend to meditate and pretend to have transformed from it. Or we pretend we tried to meditate and also pretend it didn’t suit us. And it isn’t quick and easy to know what the big ideas in meditation, along with the words that communicate them mean. It is an education, and it stretches us: you, me, and everybody else.
We don’t already understand meditation, no matter who we are. We have to learn it, and most people just aren’t up to that task. They don’t want to learn, and they default into a lot of pretending in their lives. The word for that, pretentiousness, pretty well sums up much of what passes as meditation “instruction” on the internet: it’s just adult or young-adult level pretending to know and understand something that take more than whatever these pretenders have actually done.
Once you do understand meditation and its language, you can spot pretenders as soon as the open their mouths. But if you don’t understand meditation and its language, you can spend years and years listening to people who genuinely don’t know a thing about what they are talking about. And that is a massive loss. It would be like not knowing that asbestos is poisonous, and so letting your children play in it.
I am not saying you will die if you start listening to fakers. But the boys in the photograph above lost the last years of their lives, probably at least thirty of them, that would have been part of their lifespan. When someone doesn’t distinguish between real and imaginary meditation instructions, they lose time. Some people lose 20-30 years trying to make instructions “work” that never could have “worked” because they weren’t part of a genuine system.
In my life as a meditation teacher, every year I meet people who’ve been practicing meditation for a long time, sometimes longer than I have, but they haven’t been practicing actual meditation, just what some sham teacher in the 1970s or 1980s told them to do. When I give them the first steps of genuine instructions, they are surprised, then amazed. After a year, they wonder how they managed to miss the point so completely for so long. The answer: they didn’t take the pains to make sure they were starting on a true foundation.
Meditation isn’t something somebody made up in the 20th century. It isn’t something that someone “discovered” on their own. It’s a systematic art of cultivating particular qualities of the mind which took huge spans of time, probably a thousand or more years, just to get to it’s first historically important starting point in around 500 BCE.
There is a lot behind the practice, so of course, putting the work in during our first months and years makes sense. It’s what everyone else has done before us, so would we be different?
Putting things in place with terms
Meditation charts the vast space of mind carefully, thoroughly, and provides us with a map for us to make our jourey into it. Geographical maps use pictures, but meditation maps use language. Understanding the language of meditation is what helps us make a strong start, moving us in the right direction early.
Even the most obvious and simple words you see in every book or hear in every talk about mediation need care. They aren’t just words, they’re terms. Terms are words, but words with superpowers. Meditation has a whole language of superpowered words.
Let’s start with our first point: meditation. Referring back the definition I gave above:
Meditation is the inner practice of mind and awareness …
Let’s look at the two words at the end: mind and awareness. These are big words and there is a lot to say about each. Awareness will come in another post, here we’ll tuck into the word mind.
Mind is one of three components that make up a human being. Here are all three:
Body
Mind
Awareness
I know these are nothing new, but within meditation, you’ll find further layers of meaning in each one. And when these become part of your experience, you’ll be a changed person.
Meditators have a lot to share, but of course so do doctors, scientists, gym teachers, etc., and they all use these same terms.
But they use them differently. And in this series of articles, we are interested in what meditators have to say about these three. Doctors have their own platform, and so do scientists and gym teachers (don’t they?).
Meditators have had their own platform for centuries, but haven’t found their way into the modern world as quickly as necessary to retain their ownership of their own knowledge. That’s why there are so many fakers making it big on social media despite not knowing a thing about the topic itself.
Mind has a full time job: it is the knower of things
Mind is a major topic in meditation. I could get lost in an attempt to make it all clear, so let’s establish the basics, just what you need to know to take a next step.
What is mind?
Mind is that which knows other.
And that’s that.
But…. What does that mean?
It means that the part of our experience that recognizes the presence of another thing (a cup of coffee, a cat, a headache), and knows it as something else (something “other”), is called mind.
Mind doesn’t just “know,” it knows something other than itself. It knows the thing over there. It knows, or assumes, that thing is something else, something not it. When I see you, I assume you are not me. Mind does this. Mind also knows the things we see in dreams. It knows the daydream while the daydream is happening. It knows the cup of coffee on the table.
Mind is not awareness.
There’s another face to this single experience, the inward facing aspect that knows itself. Most people (though not everyone), also have a sense of “me” that is distinct enough from “other” that they can talk about it, describe it, and recognize it within their experience. This is the “sense of self” that becomes important later on in mediation, it becomes an object of meditation that really starts to turn our world inside out (in the best possible way).
The part of us that knows itself is called awareness. It is a different thing from mind.
Mind knows other, and awareness knows itself (or “ourself”), and the two taken together constitute our experience of the world.
This becomes a treasure trove in mediation
It sounds philosophical, but it’s a simple idea: mind is the part of us that knows the things in the world. Our hands don’t know the things of the world, and our liver doesn’t know the things of the world. It’s our mind that has this quality. And let’s be frank: on its own this hardly seems like anything we needed to know. It seems obvious.
But all that changes when you start experiencing things in meditation. The distinction between mind, the things it knows, and the awareness that knows itself becomes a huge, vibrating Eureka moment just coming over the horizon. That’s when, as my first teacher told me, “you’ll be racing through all your notebooks looking for this information again.” And he was right.
When you begin to have genuine meditative experience, all these ideas come to life and you are relieved to have them mapped out in advance. It’s like you find yourself lost in the woods, except that you remember that you have a map and a flashlight in your pocket!
Scenario: Your hands touch a cup of hot coffee and feel warmth.
Breakdown: Your hands feel (physical sensation) the warmth, but don’t know that warmth. The mind is what knowsthat warmth.
And who is knowing that experience? Not the mind: it is just knowing the warmth. The you that experiences that “knowing the warmth” is awareness. But until you can separate awareness from mind, mind will pollute the experience of awareness, such that you can’t easily differentiate them.
Parts of the mind
Where the topic of mind gets interesting is when we talk about the parts of the mind. Because oh yes, the mind, the part of us that knows, has another characteristic: it has faculties. Faculties are parts that perform unique functions. Anger is a faculty, and so is conscientiousness. And they are not the same, they perform functions that are unique to them.
Functions might seem like a funny term for anger, but anger does not produce the same results as patience, desire does not produce the same results as equanimity. The difference in the results shows how each of these performs a function. But it doesn’t mean that we need each of these or that their functions are good for us.
Anger never, ever produces love or well being or joy (according to the meditation tradition, that is), just like tomato seeds will never produce palm trees, lions, or anything other than tomato plants. The function of the tomato seed is to produce tomato plants.
What is the function of anger then? Anger has the function of separating us from peace and paving the way for negative conduct.
Similarly, the opposite of anger, absence of hatred, is a state of mind that does not have a hostile attitude toward a person or a feeling, and it has the function of not becoming involved in negative actions.
It is all mapped, already
Every substantial flavor of the mind, from anger and arrogance, to equanimity and conscientiousness, has been very carefully observed and understood, almost like (or exactly like) the periodic table of chemical elements. When you understand the various types of mental experiences that appear and influence your mind, you can become skillful and help the good ones flourish and the unhealthy ones weaken.
In the books, these are called “mental factors” which is a technical way of describing emotions or character traits, such as:
self-respect
diligence
jealousy
pride
Altogether there are fifty-one mental factors, and when you begin to see them in action, you become the pilot of your ship. Until that point, you are in a rudderless boat adrift a stormy sea.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff the meditation teachings have to say about our mind, our experiences, and how much power we actually have to reorganize ourselves and set off for an adventure that would be impossible otherwise.
And if you stick with it, it will all find its way to you without overwhelm. It’s an organic education made possible by the practice of meditation. Most of this is learned not just by reading, but by seeing. The seeing happens on the mediation seat.
Read the whole series! Subscribe for free!
wrapping up: mind
Here’s our expanded summary, with the definitions of both meditation and mind combined:
Meditation, the practice of freeing ourselves from fear and confusion, involves working with the mind, the part of us that knows the things it comes into contact with.
And how does the meditator work with the mind to free themselves from fear and confusion? They do so by isolating the most important faculties and making them strong: mindfulness and awareness!
And that’s what we’ll talk about next time!
Jeffrey
This article is part of the Meditation 101: Six Ideas to Clarify Your Practice
You can read the rest of the series by following these links: