Our dharma practice moves us toward liberation from suffering and from the habitual mental patterns that create suffering. In doing so, the practice relies on several essential foundations, including generosity, ethical conduct, and meditative cultivation. In the practice of meditation, we cultivate the dual mind qualities of concentration, which relaxes the mind and allows for clearer awareness, and mindfulness, which results in important insights into life as it is, as embodied in the three characteristics of dukkha (suffering), anicca (impermanence), and anatta (non self). Those insights lead to an easing of craving and clinging, and greater freedom. In that process, there are several changes in how we relate to our experience, as a result of those insights. This discussion concerns a few of those changes in how we relate to our thoughts, sensations, perceptions, and other mental formations.
The first, very basic, insight that alters how we view experience is that we notice that we can observe our thoughts and feelings. Before beginning practice, we may have taken for granted that our thoughts and feelings just happen based on the situation we are in. With mindfulness, we learn that we can observe and inquire about our mind states.
Secondly, we see with mindfulness that our thoughts are not a direct reflection of reality as it is. Beginning the practice, we may believe that what we think is how reality actually is, and with mindfulness we begin to see how our thoughts are conditioned by the ideas, preferences, desire, and aversions of the conditioned mind.
With this change, we begin to take our thoughts with at least a grain of salt, and get acquainted with the wisdom of not knowing.
A third insight observes that our mental experiences are not something we choose. Seeing this, we discover that mind states we have called “mine” arise based on causes and conditions. There is not a thinker that decides to be angry or fearful or have desires. Seeing this, there is less identification with the ever-shifting contents of the mind. This allows us to observe mental phenomena arise and dissolve without either identifying with them and acting on them, or rejecting them and trying to fix them.
A fourth shift occurs when we discover that there is an awareness that is observing the contents of our minds as they arise and dissolve. As mindfulness deepens, there is mindfulness not only of the mental states and sensations that arise, but in addition, there is awareness that there is a witnessing presence that is aware of what is arising. We recognize that this awareness is itself not caught in reactivity, as the contents of the mind often are. Seeing this, we also discover that we can take refuge in that spacious awareness that is not in the grip of greed, hatred, and delusion.
These shifts in how we view our experiences result in opening to life, freer from the need to either act on our thought patterns, judge them, or “fix” them. We deepen our capacity to hold our experience in a space of mindful, peaceful awareness. In that process, our practice creates the conditions for deeper insight, less identification with the contents of the mind, greater peace, and deeper freedom.
Joe McCormack has practiced insight meditation since 1995 and has been a member of the Show Me Dharma Teachers Council since 2002. He will be teaching a non-residential Householder Retreat with Robert Brumet in Kansas City October 20-26, 2019.