What is Vipassana? Mindfulness Meditation

The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

The complete term for insight meditation is "vipassana-bhavana." "Bhavana" means a system of mental training that cultivates wisdom or concentration.

All meditation techniques can be classified into two types: insight, also called "mindfulness" (vipassana-bhavana), and tranquility, or concentration (samatha-bhavana).

In tranquility practice one fixes the attention on a single object until the mind enters a trance. One develops enough concentration to still the mind and suppress mental impurities such as anger. When the meditation stops, however, the negative emotions return.

In the practice of insight, on the other hand, one cultivates mindfulness in order to see the real characteristics of existence: unsatisfactoriness, impermanence, and impersonality. All the activities of daily life can be objects of mindfulness: bodily actions, feelings, thoughts and emotions - even painful ones. Nothing is suppressed. In mindfulness practice one notes and lets go of different objects as they appear, rather than keeping the mind fixed on one thing exclusively. Although some concentration is needed for vipassana practice, it is only the level called "momentary concentration," which is weaker than that required for the trance-states.

The path of concentration results in short-term calmness, bliss and, ultimately, psychic powers. The path of mindfulness, on the other hand, leads to permanent freedom from suffering. This freedom is called "nibbana," the deathless.

We practice vipassana meditation in order to see the mind, to know it rather than control it, as Bhikkhu Sopako Bodhi says. To see one's mind clearly is to see ultimate reality.

Many of us find excuses to avoid cultivating the mind. There is the familiar objection, "I just don't have enough concentration to meditate." But as we said, strong concentration is not a requirement for mindfulness work.

But there is another point. Ask yourself this: does one need an aptitude to take penicillin? No; one takes it because one is ill. Like medicine, meditation is not something for which one needs an aptitude, but a prescription for illness; and the worse it tastes, the more it's likely needed. The Buddha said that everyone suffers from the mental sickness of greed, hatred and delusion. But anyone - repeat, anyone - can achieve mental health and happiness by "taking" vipassana.

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

What is Mindfulness?

We have said that vipassana practice develops mindfulness. Mindfulness is the continuous awareness, with bare attention, of one's activities, sensations and thoughts in the present moment. With mindfulness - and this is key - one does not judge or react to passing phenomena, but merely notes their occurrence impartially, without attraction or repulsion.

Take thoughts, for instance: rather than following them out, simply watch them come and go as if they were clouds sliding across the sky. Do not identify them as your self; do not feel guilty when a "bad" thought comes. For thoughts are not our selves but just the activity of the restless mind. The untrained mind by its very nature churns out obsessive issues and neuroses that distort one's vision of reality. The brake of mindfulness stops these issues and prevents the mind from generating more.

It should be emphasized that mindfulness of the body, thoughts, feelings, sense-impressions, and so on does not mean thinking about these phenomena but merely knowing them with bare attention, the instant they arise.

The Country of Now

To be mindful is to stay in the ultimate now, to be acutely aware of what body and mind are doing in the present instant. One doesn't remember past events or anticipate the future. The last breath is in the past. It is gone. The next breath hasn't happened yet. Only the present breath (or sight, sound, movement, etc.) is real.

But how can one survive in the world while staying in the present to such a degree? Of course, in order to function in everyday life we must plan and remember, must think about language, sense-impressions and so on. At such times we cannot be exactly in the present moment, although we can use clear comprehension to be aware of our activities.

But we can set aside a special time for mindfulness practice during which we reverse the daily habit. Whether that's an hour every morning or a year-long retreat, during that time there's no thought of yesterday's crisis, no mental leap toward the future, not even the next breath. The task is simple: train the mind to keep up with the present flow of phenomena without falling back or spinning forward even for a second.

That is not hard to understand. What may be somewhat more difficult to grasp, however, is the degree to which nowness should be taken. It is more extreme and precise than one might think.

It may help to realize that there are degrees of the present, even of the present moment. Imagine looking at a forested hill through a camera. The farther away one stands, the smaller and less distinct the forest appears. As one zooms closer, more details emerge clearly. Here we're using distance as a metaphor for time.

To those who are miles from the forest, staying in the present might mean, for instance, enjoying life from day to day without planning for retirement. To those who zoom closer, it could mean paying attention while doing the dishes - keeping one's mind on the task rather than letting it stray to the argument of yesterday morning.

But is this as close as one can get to the trees? Or, to rephrase, is this as far as one can go into the present? As a matter of fact, it is not. We believe it's the limit only because we haven't cultivated mindfulness. But with mindfulness we can zoom closer. Then we find that the present moment opens up into many more levels. We're able to perceive more and more details, subtleties we'd never noticed before, until we reach the ultimate extreme of nowness. At that point reality appears very different - as the mirror image, in fact, of what we'd thought it was. We realize that our lack of awareness had distorted perception. But now we see things as they actually are. This is to cross the border of conventional truth into the province of ultimate reality.

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

Giving Up Memory and Names

So how do we take the practice of nowness to the next level so as to see ultimate reality? The answer is: by giving up memory, temporarily. And not only memories from childhood, or yesterday, or one minute ago; not only the memory of our last breath. To reach a high level of vipassana insight we must give up even the names of objects, for naming is actually a subtle form of remembering, a tiny reflex back to the past. Yet we needn't worry that we'll lose anything - the memories and names will return as soon as we stop practicing. But in order to get ultimate knowledge we must give up conventional knowledge, at least for a time.

What does it mean to "give up names"? Take the example of looking at a piano. During the process of perception one first sees a colored shape; a split-second later, the mind recalls the name "piano." These two moments are so close that in daily life we cannot distinguish them at all. But mindfulness speeds up awareness to the point that we can actually perceive the moment of bare seeing before memory comes up with the name. The same perceptual process applies to any phenomena that we experience: sounds, touches, smells, thoughts, feelings, etc.

As long as we're remembering names, the mind can't be said to be in the present moment. Although it may seem impossible, awareness of a form without its name arises quite naturally during insight practice. But someone might think, "I cherish my happy memories. Why should I give them up?" To this we repeat that the memories are not permanently erased; but one begins to see that clinging to the past or living in the future are causes of suffering. Attachment to happy memories makes us long for something that is gone, and this longing is itself painful. What disappears in vipassana are not the memories themselves, but the suffering that comes from attaching to them. "A Rose by Any Other Name": Ultimate vs. Conventional Truth A name is a concept; it isn't ultimately real. It's only a convention imposed on something. Remembering the name actually distorts one's view of the real phenomenon, whether it's a sight, sound, feeling, or anything else. The truth is only the color, the sound waves, and so on.

Consider this: people of all cultures have a name for the phenomenon called, in English, "thunder." Brazilians say "trueno," the French, "tonerre." Although the names differ, the phenomenon doesn't. The event denoted by "thunder" is the same thing no matter what we dub it. In truth it is impossible to hear thunder. What we actually hear is sound. Sound waves have the same properties, and follow the same physical laws, in all cultures.

The Buddha distinguished between conventional and ultimate truth. The former means the names and concepts by which we interpret our experience. Conventional truth is relative and conceptual. It changes from person to person. But ultimate truth is the same for all. It is true in the absolute sense. That's why insight meditation is concerned with ultimate reality. Ultimate reality has two components: nama and rupa.

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

Nama and Rupa

Bhikkhu Sopako once said, "There is no vipassana without nama and rupa." They are insight meditation distilled to its essence. Nama and rupa are the two things left over when we give up names. "Nama" means mind and mental phenomena. "Rupa" means matter, or form. The mind is formless, invisible; but matter has form. Nama and rupa are the only proper objects of mindfulness.

Practically speaking, "rupa" refers to bare sensory impressions. We may not think of them as such, but sensory impressions are a type of matter; they are, in fact, our only direct experience of the latter. Color, sound, taste, smell and tactile sensation (temperature, pressure, motion), including bodily movement - these are rupa. Nama and rupa serve two functions in our moment-to-moment experience: that of knowing, and that of being known. The faculty that knows an x is nama, the mind. Let's call it the "knower." The x being known is called the "object." Objects lack awareness. Rupas, material forms, are always objects, not knowers. Rupa is not conscious. Sound cannot hear. Color cannot see. Material phenomena must be "touched" by a mind in order to be experienced.

Although rupas are always objects, not all objects are rupas. An object is anything of which the mind is aware. It can be either corporeal or incorporeal. Mental phenomena such as thoughts, emotions and feelings are, in fact, objects - objects of the mind. We can know them. In that case, one mental phenomenon is known by another mental phenomenon. Having two namas in one moment may seem confusing, as if there would be two knowers present. But only one nama at a time can be the knower. The nama serving as the object possesses no awareness. Also, a single nama can perform only one function at a time. It cannot be both knower and object simultaneously. Simply put: rupas are known. Namas know (rupas and other namas). The knower is always nama. The object can be nama or rupa.

Each moment of life contains one knower and one object. When these two come together, experience happens. For example, sound vibrations are rupa; the mind perceives the sound. Motion is rupa; nama is the agent that knows the movement. A fragrance is rupa; but it's the mind that perceives the scent. Color is rupa; nama, the mind, cognizes color. Although they are fundamental realities, individual namas and rupas are not permanent. In fact they are in continual flux, appearing and passing away faster than lightning flashes. Under ordinary circumstances we're unable to perceive this flux. But it's possible to train our minds to see it.

To see nama-rupa is to know oneself. To know oneself is to know the universe.

The Absence of "I"

When observing nama and rupa we must not think in terms of a self or describe our experience with a conventional name. When observing the body, for instance, we wouldn't think, "I feel a cramp in my leg." We'd only be aware of the feeling. Perhaps we'd label it "pain," or "feeling," but without the concept "I" and without mentally linking it to a body part.

To take another example: during walking meditation the student doesn't think, "now my foot is moving," or even the concept "foot," but is just aware of motion. It does not matter which body part is moving; every instance of motion is rupa. In ultimate terms, all rupas are equal. The only difference is that they occur in different moments. Rupas are not selves. Nor do they belong to a self. The physical body is rupa, because it is comprised of matter. It can be moved into different shapes called "postures." Let's say that we place the body into the sitting posture. Normally we'd think, "I am sitting," which is conventionally true. But according to ultimate truth it is only rupa that is sitting, only material form, not a self, not an "I." Nor is it a man or a woman who is sitting, but just physical elements.

What about nama? Nama, the mind, is not a self either. Nama is the faculty that knows that the body is sitting. But this consciousness is not equivalent to a self or a "me." It is merely an impersonal awareness that arises and passes away in a single moment. Life continues because in the next instant a new moment of consciousness arises. The notion of selfhood, the Buddha said, is nothing more than a fiction. It does not actually exist in either body or mind.

We can summarize our sensory experience in terms of nama-rupa, as follows:
Movement is rupa; nama knows (is aware of) movement.
Posture is rupa; nama knows posture.
Color is rupa; nama sees color.
Sound is rupa; nama hears sound.
Fragrance is rupa; nama smells fragrance.
Tactile contact is rupa; nama knows contact.
Flavor is rupa; nama tastes flavor.

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

Two Necessities

Two things are required in order to keep the mind in the present moment:
1) Objects occurring in the present-time and,
2) Persistence. In any type of meditation one must give the mind something to focus on. This "something" is called the "meditation object." In vipassana the only appropriate objects are those occurring in the present moment. Sometimes we generate these deliberately, as in the hand motions exercise (see How to Meditate,” Exercise 4, Hand Motions). Sometimes we merely observe what occurs naturally, such as the motion of breathing.

In fact, the principal object is the abdominal movement that occurs as we breathe. The abdomen expands or rises when we inhale. As we exhale, it deflates or falls. Since these motions never cease as long as we are alive, they make extremely convenient objects. One can practice insight meditation at any time simply by observing these motions. In vipassana, the "rising" motion is one object; the "falling" motion is another. We call these two movements "rising-falling." There are many other objects, which will be explained in the sections to come.

The second requirement is persistence. If you have tried practicing mindfulness, you will know that keeping the mind in the present isn't as easy as it sounds. Perversely, the mind always wanders away. That's all right. It takes patience to change the habit of many lifetimes. But it's crucial not to get upset with yourself. View wandering mind as an opportunity to see impersonality, nonself. Nonself means that all phenomena arise because of conditions which are not amenable to control by anyone's will. You can still effect changes, but only by creating the right conditions, not by force of willpower. And creating the right conditions takes time.

So, how should you respond when consciousness wanders? Simply note "thinking," then gently bring the mind back to the main object - whether that is rising-falling or something else. As soon as you notice the mind slipping into the past or dreaming about the future, sweep it back to the present moment where a new object, a new sound, thought or movement, is already erupting.

Persistence is key because you will have to bring the mind back again and again - literally thousands of times, until it becomes a habit. The vigilance to be maintained is continuous yet relaxed. Don't try to suppress emotions or thoughts, as in concentration practice, but allow these objects to arise naturally and then simply note them.

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

Soap Bubbles

Imagine a bottle of children's soap bubbles. When we raise the plastic wand, preparing to blow into it, no bubble yet exists; but as we blow, something begins to form. A thin film balloons out from the ring, stretching into a pouch until its edges seal and it breaks free - an independent, floating sphere. A form has appeared that had not existed a few seconds before. We have seen it "being born." But then before our eyes the transparent sphere with its bent square of rainbow bursts into emptiness. At this point it no longer exists. The bubble has disappeared without leaving any legacy, but we have witnessed its whole existence from birth to death. That is the general concept of watching an object in vipassana.

In ultimate terms every phenomenon arises, persists, and then bursts like a bubble, all in the space of one moment. In order to practice correctly we must observe an object in all three of these phases. Say, for instance, that we're observing the abdominal movements. We track the rising movement through two or three seconds of time from inception through development to cessation. Our attention is equally alert during every phase of the motion. It isn't enough just to notice the development in the middle. We must catch the beginning- and end-points, too.

The cessation is the point where the abdomen can expand no further and the rising motion stops. After that, the falling motion occurs. The falling motion is a new "bubble," so to speak, a new object, entirely different from the rising motion. We watch the falling movement, too, in all three phases: beginning, middle and end. In truth, the rising-falling motions do not constitute a continuous loop. The abdomen must stop expanding for a split second before it begins to fall, before the exhalation begins. So there is a gap between rising and falling. One can think of the rising motion as the upward arc of a rock thrown in the air. (The downward arc is the falling motion.) Upon reaching the highest point, the rock stops for a split-second before dropping. Likewise, the abdomen must stop expanding before falling back.

To stay in the present moment means that when the falling motion is occurring we don't think about the last rising movement, since it's already disappeared. To think of it would be to stray into memory, to continue to dwell on an object that no longer existed. When you are exhaling, where is the inhalation? It does not exist. It is only a memory, no longer a real, present-moment object. But after a second or two the exhalation ends, and a new inhalation occurs. Then falling is in the past and rising is the present-moment object.

One Object at a Time

Another tenet of vipassana is this: observe only one object per moment. We have said that the method of insight practice is to note phenomena occurring in the immediate present. But what if there are two or more objects happening at once - a movement, a sound and a thought, for instance? In that case, the predominant object is the one to observe. Say that we're observing the abdominal movement when a sound occurs. If it's only a faint background noise we ignore it and continue to observe the movement, which is the stronger object. But if a loud sound jolts the attention away from the motion, then the sound is the prominent object. In that case we observe "hearing" for a few moments, then return to the rising-falling motion. But while observing "hearing" we pay no attention to rising-falling.

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness

The Buddha identified four classes of objects suited to cultivating insight: the body, feeling, consciousness, and dhamma objects. These are called the "Four Foundations of Mindfulness." Body objects refer to motion and posture; feeling objects to sensations of pain, pleasure, or neutrality (not emotions). "Consciousness" refers to thoughts and the mental factors that color the mind, factors such as greed, hatred and delusion. The last category, dhamma objects, is a varied group that includes both mental and material forms: emotions such as lust, anger, sloth, restlessness and doubt (the "five hindrances"); other mental formations; and, on the material side, the five sense-impressions: sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes.

In order to raise a building one needs a foundation. Likewise, with these four objects as material we can build a strong foundation for mindfulness. Wisdom will come automatically when the foundation is laid. And the beauty of it is, we needn't seek out the construction materials. They're literally at hand, no further away than our own bodies and minds. But they must be noted in the present moment to count toward the foundation. The foundations of mindfulness are described in detail in the Satipatthana Sutra, the insight meditator's "Bible."

The Rate of Reality

How long does it take a bolt of lightning to flash? An instant? Now chop that instant finer and finer, and you'll have some idea of the duration of the mind.

Ultimately speaking, our experience is made up of individual perceptual moments that occur one after another. Mind and object flash into being and fizzle out together in a fraction of a second. The speed of their birth and death is incredible. It's said that in the duration of a lightning flash, millions of thought-moments occur. Due to this great speed, separate moments of experience seem to blur into one continuous stream, just as the blades of a fan appear blurred when they're spinning quickly. This blurring conceals the fact that reality happens in discrete quanta. It frankly prevents us from seeing the truth of impermanence.

And yet, despite appearances, the fan's blades are separate, as are the moments of consciousness. So, although we tend to think of consciousness as an unbroken line stretching back to our birth, the "line" of the mind is not solid, but dotted. That means that the notion of a continuous self that persists through time is a fiction. Each mind-moment disappears completely before the next one arises. Nothing carries over from one instant to the next, not even a core called "soul" or "I." So the Buddha taught.

But if the mind is truly a "broken line," then why don't we experience it that way? Because of an illusion in perception, similar to the optical illusion of the moving fan. In daily life we always have some degree of delusion in the mind, which makes the separate moments of existence seem seamlessly connected, just as the spinning fan-blades appear as one continuous blur.

The first reason, therefore, that we don't know the mind as a "broken line" is that delusion creates the appearance of continuity. The second reason is that mindfulness is too weak to keep up. The general awareness of daily life is simply not fast enough to see the gaps between moments. In order to experience consciousness as it really is, i.e., in order to see that discrete, short-lived mind-moments arise serially, we need to make our awareness more precise. And for that we need a technique.

But there's a problem. How can we perceive something that's moving so fast? Given their speed, how can we catch these mind-moments one by one? If we stared at a moving fan long enough, could we count the individual blades? No. Even after days of watching, we wouldn't know if the fan had five or three blades, since we'd only see a blur of color. The solution would be to unplug the fan. When it slowed down we could easily count the number of blades.

But unlike the fan, we can't slow the rate of ultimate phenomena for our convenience. It is set, absolute. Then how can we see its components? There's an alternative. As observers, we can try to catch up. We can accelerate our own rate of observation. We can speed up mindfulness until it's moving at the same rate as reality - or at least until it's going fast enough to glimpse those ultimate phenomena in detail. Let us illustrate.

Say that you're standing beside the freeway and someone drives past at seventy mP.h. You would realize that a car had passed, but the driver's face wouldn't be clear. The car would have zoomed by too quickly for you to catch any details. But let's say that you then jumped into your own car and followed the vehicle until you caught up, pulling into the lane beside. Now that you'd be traveling at the same speed you could see the other driver clearly, could make out the color of her eyes and hair.

This is an analogy for mindfulness. When mindful awareness is strong it "catches up to the car." Astonishingly, it's able to keep up with the rate of ultimate reality and see the lightning-quick changes of mind and body. We might think it impossible to perceive such rapid changes. But the good news is that mindfulness need go that fast for just few moments - even one second - in order to transcend mundane experience.

When mindfulness becomes this rapid, wisdom and other factors join with it. When all these mental factors come together the mind, in a matter of moments, goes beyond nama-rupa. Since there is no greed, hatred or delusion present, the mind touches something immune to change, an element free of all suffering. That experience is called "enlightenment." But to get mindfulness to become that fast we must slow down - slow our movements, that is. That may sound paradoxical, but think of an accomplished pianist. In order to play like the wind in concert, he must first spend years training his hands with slow practice.

Moreover, since consciousness itself arises and vanishes from one instant to the next, our technique must reflect this. Just being aware in a general way isn't enough if we want to see the gaps in the mental stream, which means to see impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and impersonality.

Therefore, we practice a method called "moment-to-moment" mindfulness, which differs from the plain-vanilla kind. The former refers to the step-by-step observation of body and mind, literally from one moment to the next. For this we chop our experience and actions into small increments called "moments." In walking meditation, for instance, each step is broken down into six separate motions. Like splitting hairs, the meditator's awareness becomes more subtle and precise. He is able to see shorter and shorter moments very clearly. The more the student practices, the more momentum mindfulness gathers, until at last it can see a single mind-moment arising and vanishing.

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

The Juggler

To illustrate the vipassana method of focusing on objects, which differs from the concentration method, consider a juggler. A juggler's focus is touch-and-go. "Focus and forget it," is the motto. The same applies to insight meditation. The student must heed both halves of the maxim if he wants to get maximum benefit from practice. A good juggler knows where the next ball will descend. He keeps his mind on that spot. If his eyes float off elsewhere, if he allows himself to be distracted by the noise or movement around him, he'll fail. Likewise, the meditator must keep his attention on a single object in its entire phase of arising-and-passing away. If not, he won't see its characteristics clearly. And if he fails to keep his mind in the present moment, he'll miss the now and observe an object that's already in the past.

Now for the "forget it" part: as soon as one ball contacts his hand the juggler lets it go - otherwise how could he catch the next one? He keeps his attention moving, letting it jump from one thing to the next. What kind of performer would pause to gaze at the ball he'd just caught, unwilling to surrender it because he liked the color? Likewise, when the meditator does catch the right object he must release it - otherwise he can't catch the next phenomenon. His attention should rest no longer than one moment on any form. If the same object - a sound, say - presents itself again because it's still going on, the meditator simply notes it a second time, then lets it go again. In the case of sound he would note, "hearing, hearing, hearing," in a series of moments, letting go after each one.

The Five Senses

The vipassana student must know how to observe the five sense-impressions - sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes - since these are the objects that most often trigger desire and hatred. In the Malukyaputta Sutta we read, "As phenomena are seen, heard, thought of, or known, just let them be as they are seen, heard, thought of, or known at that moment. When you see, just see; when you hear, just hear; when you think, just think; and when you know, just know." (It's implied that one should treat smells, tastes and touches in the same way).

To let these phenomena be as they are "at that moment" means not to elaborate. As soon as you see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think or know something, just be aware of the bare sensation; don't add your good or bad mental description. And do not continue to think about the sight or sound after it's passed away. If you hang on to a past object you can't attend to the one occurring in the present moment, since the mind can hold only one object at a time.

So the student doesn't keep thinking about something that was seen or heard a few moments before. But that doesn't go quite far enough. He must cut off the mental stream at an even earlier level. To see things as they are "at that moment" means to see them as they are prior to the act of naming them. In vipassana practice we try to stop the mind at the point of perceiving a bare phenomenon, before the mind tags the thing with a conventional name. When we catch the sensation before the name appears, there won't be a feeling that it's good or bad. All formations will be seen to be neutral and without meaning, with no essential difference between a sight, a feeling, or a thought. It is only the mental distortions, the concepts we impose, that name things as this or that, or range them on a scale from transcendent to awful.

So just be aware of the act of seeing, the act of hearing, smelling, moving, thinking and so on. When you refrain from conceptualizing about an object, neither greed, hatred nor delusion will have a chance to spring up. Then you'll see that sights and other sense-impressions last only an instant before disappearing.

However, as a beginner you probably won't be able to "just see" or "just hear" for some time. You will still be aware of names, and the assumed values that haunt them. That's all right. Just don't focus on those misleading labels. Don't think, "Now I'm seeing a chair, hearing a bird, moving my foot." Instead it's just: seeing, hearing, moving. Let the conventional meanings be there, but ignore them. Don't be swayed by judgments of good or bad. At the same time, aim for the target of pure phenomena as much as you can. As clear comprehension grows you will find yourself more and more able to dissect pure phenomenal reality from what is merely conceptual, until the Noble Truths occur right before your eyes.

Skip to:

The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

Make Everything into an Object

The trick to vipassana (and the wonder of it) is in turning any phenomenon, especially those once thought to be parts of the self, into an object of mindfulness. What we learn is that thoughts, emotions and feelings are not in fact parts of the knower. Since they are actually impersonal objects, not the subject, we can treat them as such, can turn the beam of awareness around and look at them as if they were outside of us.

At first you'll feel that some phenomena are inseparably part of the knower, are too close to observe because they are the observer. They are you. But whenever you feel this way, turn your awareness around one-hundred-eighty degrees and observe that very thing.

The more you progress, the more you'll run out of things in the "self" category; the more you'll see that everything can be turned into an object, even the mind. Ultimately speaking, even the mind is other, is alien and impersonal because it doesn't follow our wishes. That is one meaning of nonself. We can keep turning awareness back onto itself to observe the knower more and more, one instant after the next. With mindfulness the mental stream consumes itself in the end, like a serpent eating its tail. At that point, it's said, one touches something beyond the conditioned world of mind and matter.

But normally we mistake objects - especially thoughts, emotions or feelings - for aspects of our selves. We think, "I'm sleepy" or, "I'm bored." Note the "I" here. It's a necessary convention of everyday speech. But we have come to believe in the fictitious self that "I" denotes. The identification to self slides in almost invisibly. The mind, in a rapid sleight of hand, assumes boredom to be part of itself rather than an other to be observed.

So if boredom, tiredness, or other mental sensations arise, turn the beam of awareness onto them and note "boredom" or "tiredness." Do not appropriate them, do not assume that they're aspects of your self that somehow belong to you. Pull your awareness back from those objects and watch them to see what they're like, to see that such emotions arise momentarily only to disappear. Since they arise and vanish so quickly, how could they be parts of a permanent self? Moreover, if you assume boredom to be a part of your self, how can you observe it as a separate thing? But when you dissociate from it, when you realize that it isn't intrinsically merged with the knower and you make it into an object of awareness, then everything changes. That is a very important point. It's the way to freedom.

If you can turn the beam of your awareness onto those phenomena usually regarded as parts of the knower, your mind will not get entangled with suffering. Then no matter what arises, mindfulness will turn that thing into an object and observe it, keeping you cool and safe from the defilements' heat.

There is nothing toward which the beam of awareness cannot be directed, nothing that stands within the imaginary circle of self and cannot be made into an object. Everything can be pulled outside of the circle and looked at. Tell yourself, "All those emotions and thoughts that I took to be myself, and that it never occurred to me could be observed as objects or "outside" things, I am now going to observe, as an experiment. I'm going to turn the beam of mindfulness onto all of them, even the knower, to learn if they are permanent or if they dissolve at the touch of light."

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

Why Stay in the Present?

We have talked a great deal about the present moment. Why do we need to stay in it? The answer is: in order to uncover, and thereby eliminate, the cause of suffering. That cause is desire (tanha). When its cause is absent, suffering cannot arise. We then experience supramundane happiness.

But that doesn't mean that the stuff of the mundane now - sights, sounds and so on - turns out to be wonderful. Mindfulness doesn't uncover some hidden beauty in the empty vibrations. This point needs to be understood, because there's a myth among some meditation circles that by staying in the now we'll finally see and appreciate the innate beauty of every touch, sight, smell and so forth.

But from whence comes this "innate" beauty? To determine this, we'd need to see what the present moment was actually made of, what its components were. But unless we're already enlightened and can experience nibbana, those components are nothing more than the old combination of nama-rupa, phenomena which become less wondrous upon inspection. Indeed, the sharper our mindfulness, the more worthless these pain-producers appear, until at last we lose all desire for them. So eliminating ignorance doesn't mean that blips of mind and matter turn out to be better than we'd thought, that we'd merely been blind to their loveliness before. The azure bowl doesn't look brighter; the warm bath doesn't feel better when experienced mindfully. (An increase of concentration, however, can intensify sense-impressions; but that is neither insight nor mindfulness.)

The happiness gained from vipassana comes, not from conditioned phenomena turning out to be beautiful in the ultimate sense, but from dropping our attachment to those empty sensations. When asked how there could be happiness in nibbana without sensation, the Buddha's chief disciple, Ven. Sariputta, replied: "That there is no sensation is itself happiness." When compared to the total absence of sensation, even blissful feelings are undesirable.

To say that mindfulness will make the plum taste sweeter, the winter clouds more sublime, or the act of doing the dishes an exercise in wonder, chafes against the First Noble Truth. Why? Because, regardless of how attentive we are, there exists no core of beauty in sensation, in visible form, scent, flavor, smell and sound, for mindfulness to uncover. Sensation - nama and rupa - are literal embodiments of dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, because they change. In order to realize nibbana we must see dukkha so clearly that, in the end, all attachment to sensory and mental existence falls away. At the moment of letting go we'll transcend those conditioned things and touch the unconditioned.

So we practice mindfulness, not in order to magnify sense pleasures (a deluded goal), but to witness with our own eyes the unsatisfactoriness of pleasure; to see the truth that one cannot have worldly pleasure without its flipside, anxiety and pain, in equal proportion. Seeing this, we'll stop looking for happiness in places where it cannot exist. Seeking pure happiness in mind and matter is like building houses on quicksand and expecting them to stand. Expectations so unrealistic guarantee disappointment.

But pure happiness can be found - if it couldn't, why would the Buddha have remained a monk when he could have returned to his family palace? And why would he have bothered to teach? The truth is, we don't need to drop the expectation for happiness, only to look in a different direction.

The present moment can become wonderful not because its components (mind and matter) are innately so, but because we can relinquish our attachment to those phenomena, to their deceptive and dubious pleasures, at any time. The mind then achieves a happiness independent of outside influence, and the changing faces of phenomena no longer disappoint because we're not lured in. That liberation is the wonder. Then, even when the body is in pain, the mind can "stand apart" and not suffer.

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The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time

Stop the Wheel

The raison d'être for mindfulness practice only becomes clear in the context of rebirth. Although mindfulness will help us greatly in the present, it is practiced with an eye toward preventing future lives.

Buddhists believe that beings are reborn over and over again in various realms, according to their actions. Until their minds are completely purified, there is no end to the cycle. The ultimate goal of the Buddhist, and of vipassana practice, is complete release from this cycle of birth and death, release from the round of conditioned existence, samsara. That release, called "nibbana," can occur in the present lifetime if we create the right conditions.

The Buddha said that birth and death (and the myriad stuffs in between) always entail dukkha, unsatisfactoriness. Although one might be relatively happy, existence is tainted at the most basic level because its components, mind and matter, are unstable and impermanent, continually arising and vanishing. Thus, any satisfaction we might gain from them is temporary and tinged with fear about its loss. Even at best, mundane happiness is a mix; a ratio of, say, seventy percent joy and thirty percent anxiety. And the proportions quickly reverse.

To take another example: The head of a coin is inseparable from the tail. Worldly happiness also has a flipside, an inseparable one, which is unhappiness. This flipside appears in equal proportion when the happiness ends. As the Player King in Hamlet said, "Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament." But the happiness that goes beyond birth and death has no such dark underbelly because it is free of attachment and is permanent.

Furthermore, although one might be relatively happy now, because all beings have accumulated unwholesome kamma (karma) in the past there is always the possibility of a painful rebirth entailing severe illness, starvation, etc. We go about our business like blinkered horses that tread near the edge of a canyon. But without the condition of birth there could be no danger. No suffering could occur. Lack of birth does not mean nothingness. It means the element called "nibbana," the cessation of greed, hatred and delusion, the highest happiness.

So how does one prevent birth from occurring again? By practicing mindfulness. With mindfulness one eliminates desire, hatred and delusion from the mind, which stops the cycle of rebirth. Desire and ignorance are conditions for rebirth. When they are erased no birth, and hence no suffering, can follow.

Digging Out the Root

External events are not the real cause of sorrow. They are merely the branches. The root lies within us. We practice vipassana in order to eliminate the root cause of suffering. But in order to pull out the root, we must know how it came to be established in the first place. The question is, how does suffering arise? An example will show how dukkha (unsatisfactoriness, suffering) is generated by a cause and effect process, a process that hinges on our reactions to sights, sounds and so forth.

Let's say that you're eyeing a bowl of chrysanthemums. Ultimately speaking, the bare cognitive reception of seeing is neither good nor bad. The color itself isn't pretty or ugly. But when you lack mindfulness, rather than stopping with that neutral sensation your mind goes farther and adds the concept of beauty or ugliness. Let's assume that in this case it adds a veil of beauty. Having misperceived the sight as beautiful you like it and feel desire for it. You keep thinking about it even after you leave the room, even when the image is no longer before you. "What beautiful mums! What if I just put them in the car and took them home?" So you steal the flowers. Now, the mental act of liking or disliking is considered a form of action in Buddhism, as are all intentional thoughts. The physical act of stealing the flowers is also an action.

Intentional mental, verbal and physical actions are called kamma (karma). Kamma always yields a result that comes back to the one who performed it. When these mental and physical actions - i.e., these kammas - are rooted in desire, hatred and delusion, their result is rebirth. Reborn into samsara, the wheel of birth and death, one must endure many kinds of suffering.

But all we need do is stop the gears at any one point, and the causal machinery that binds us to samsara will collapse. At what point can we stop them? At the point between contact with an object and the act of liking or disliking it. In vipassana we learn how not to react to sense- and mental-impressions, how not to like or dislike them. That's called the "Middle Way," a way between the two extremes of desire and aversion. The trick is to catch things early enough so as to see just the bare phenomena rather than conventional forms. That's really all we need to do. Since bare phenomena, nama-rupa, are neither good nor bad, it will be impossible to like or dislike them. By observing mind and matter impartially we'll cease to create fresh kamma, thus stopping the process that results in suffering.

Perhaps the most common meditation mistake is believing that it's enough to observe objects in terms of conventional reality. But meditation only counts as insight if one is tracking bare phenomena. Like plumes of smoke, these are impersonal and void of the meanings inherent in names. But such descriptions as "now my foot is moving," or "I'm watching my breath," are still on the level of names and labels. Those objects - "foot," "breath," - are still conceptual, not actual. The actual in these examples is just motion itself. Ultimately speaking, there is no one moving; nor is it a leg or an arm that is moving, only the air element. That is rupa. The motion isn't happening to you or inside of you. It's only appearing and disappearing in open space. Can you see the difference?

If you can avoid the mistake of observing conventional objects you'll have found the quickest shortcut to the goal.

Skip to:

The Two Kinds of Meditation: Mindfulness and Concentration

Giving Up Memory and Names / A Rose by Any Other Name

The Four Foundations of Mindfulness / The Rate of Reality

Soap Bubbles / One Object at a Time