(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. - A few years ago, I was interviewed on breakfast television for the first time. I've been interviewed on breakfast for television. I was interviewed by Johnny Vaughn. I don't know whether you know Johnny Vaughn anyway. One of the things that happens when you're interviewed on television is they keep on telling you what they're going to ask you. So if you think it's all sort of happening in the moment, I'm sorry to just point you, but they keep on saying exactly what they're going to say to you. And then you have to say to them exactly what you're going to say back. And what I noticed on this particular time I was interviewed by Johnny Vaughn, it was a nice bloke by the way. They kept saying, "So what we're going to ask you, "my tribe I'm doing? "We're going to come around to you. "We're going to ask you what happens when you die?" And remember, this is breakfast television. So what happens when you die? Okay, and then the camera, woo, woo. Everybody claps and I don't know what they do. It's a sort of strange thing. And I had about half a minute to reply. And I remember, as we were waiting, I had to stand on the set. You have to all go on this set. It was a Christmas show. And we asked us to wear funny hats and tinsel and all that sort of thing. And I was thinking, "I simply can't wear tinsel "with a case, sir." And I remember the director kept on coming out and saying, "More noise, more noise." So the guy kept calling me cheeky buddhist and everybody started laughing. And the guy was like, "More, no, cheeky buddhist." You know, so the kid's asking me though. So before they keep cutting and say, "Okay, next one." And then this lady with a clipboard would come over to me and say, "Okay, so Johnny's going to ask you "what happens when you die? "What are you going to say?" And I'd tell her. And then there'd be a bit more and then she'd come back and say, "So Johnny's going to ask you, "what happens when you die? "And what are you going to say?" And I literally went through about three times. Anyway, fair enough, eventually Johnny did actually ask me. What happens when you die? And what I said was what my own teacher says. And remember, I'm on Braver's television, so I can't get into metaphysics. I can't get into subtlety really. So I just said, "What my teacher said?" Which is, "You'll soon find out." (audience laughing) And this is what created this chart of cheeky buddhist (audience laughing) because I said, "You'll soon find out." But it's a brilliant answer, isn't it? What happens when you die? You'll soon find out. And that in a way is the buddhist response. It's in that response of saying, "Never mind that, never mind the metaphysics. "What you know is it's going to happen "and it'll happen soon. "You'll soon find out, Jim." So that I think is a really important starting point. It's a starting point I think for me is that you'll soon find out. So what does that mean? That means that you're alive now. You soon won't be. And that's what it's saying. You're alive now and you soon won't be. So what does that mean about life now? If you're going to be dying soon, and it is soon, what does it mean about being alive now? What does it mean about being alive? So actually, you'll soon find out is the best possible answer in many ways. It's probably more powerful, more valuable than any metaphysical answer. So the buddhist answer to that question, the buddhist answer to, okay, so what do you do with your life given that you're going to die? One of the main answers to that is that you practice mindfulness. And mindfulness is about living. It's about being really alive. It's about noticing that you're alive when you're alive, because all the thing you know now is that you are alive now and that you won't be soon. So mindfulness primarily is about being alive to your experience, really living in your experience here and now, not letting it all just drift past and then you're dead, yeah? So I want to talk a little bit about the path of mindfulness as taught by the Buddha. I want to say a few other things as well, but I want to talk about this path of mindfulness. And it's a path of being more alive. You can think of a whole of Buddhism as about moving from being less alive to being more alive. So I want to start looking at mindfulness in terms of what I've called in my book, "Day to Day Mindfulness." And the Buddha didn't teach this, and I haven't made it up, but the Buddha didn't teach this. The Buddha taught in a very, very simple world comparatively to ours. But I think that before we start to look at what the Buddha taught about mindfulness, we need to go a step down from that and we need to think of day to day mindfulness. And by day to day mindfulness, I mean things like remembering your keys. I mean things like remembering where you put your oyster card. I mean things like planning carefully and so on. So in the book that I've written, I've had a whole chapter devoted to day to day mindfulness. It's mindfulness of small things. Actually, I think that one of the teachings of Buddhism is that small things have a big effect. That if we want to change our life, we need to look at small things, not big things. So if you want to start to become more alive, the first place to start is to look at the small things of your life. What actually makes life difficult? And so often it's simple things like forgetting your keys, being late for your train. Those kind of day to day matters. You know, whatever whatever they are. So the first place to start with mindfulness really I think before we get on to the Buddha's teaching of mindfulness is just simple day to day mindfulness. And I've encouraged a few things in my book, particularly I wanted to just highlight two things. And the first thing is reducing input. I think that would be a really good way of cultivating day to day mindfulness. It's just reducing the amount of input you open yourself to. So when I first meditated, I remember the first time I came here, I think it was the first time I sat still with my eyes closed without doing anything, without having the radio on, without having a CD on, without having the television on the background. When you meditate, it's a really classic experience of reducing input. You try and in here you sit in the quiet room and so on. So one of the things we could do with day to day mindfulness is just reduce the amount of input. So see if you can turn the tele off a bit more. See, or if you are watching tele, see if you can not channel flip from one channel to another. So this is simply reducing the amount of input that you get. 'Cause when you come to meditate, how much input you've had really affects your mind, doesn't it? So if you've been having listened to lots of sounds, if you've been having lots of experiences sending out lots of emails, being very involved in input, then it'll be much, much more difficult to quiet in your mind and because of that much more difficult to live vividly. Often I think you've probably found already when you meditate that your mind is just all over the place. And largely what it's doing is just kind of ricocheting from all that input that we get. So one thing we could do to practice day to day mindfulness is just reduce the amount of input that we have in day to day life. I should say that my book is also very practical. So the idea of the book is to think, okay, how do we practice this? So I'll just sort of mention some of them as we go along. The other point to really bear in mind in day to day mindfulness is what psychologists call mastery, developing mastery, yeah? So mastery is when you develop a skill, a talent, when you rise to a challenge, when you do something. So if you're feeling low, for instance, one of the things you can do is write a to-do list and you just do the first three things on it. The three things you can do easily. So you know those days where you just think, oh, gosh, you know, I've got, sometimes I can feel like one of the sort of a mule surrounded by bales of hay, all of which I need to nibble. And I just don't know which way to go first. You know, that experience where you've just got any email to do, you've got to talk to this person, you are going to make a phone call, and they're all kind of ranged around you, and you can just sort of feel horribly overwhelmed in the midst of it. So one thing you can do with mastery is simply do three things immediately that you can do now. So you can go and put your clothes in the washing machine, you can make that one phone call, you could send that simple email. Now a lot of the things we do are much more complicated than that, but if you just do those first three things that you can do now immediately and get done and cross them off your list, what that will do is give you a bit of a sense of mastery that you've done something, that you've achieved something already, that you can cross something off your list. It's a horrible sense you can go in modern life so easily, of life just being lots and lots of bits, bits that you have to file, bits you have to be in, bits you have to send, and you can feel your life being more and more surrounded by bits. It's one of the great challenges, I think, in modern life. So what do we do about all these bits in our lives? So one of the things we need to do is cultivate mastery. So that means actually trying to get things done and having this sense of achievement of getting things done. And that sense of achievement is really important for the development of positive emotion, and I'll come onto positive emotion in a minute, but you really need positive emotion, and one of the bases of that, and this is becoming one more clear, is this sense of achievement, of having done something, of having achieved something, even if it's a tiny thing. So those are just two things you could highlight in day-to-day mindfulness. It's remembering to do the small things so that you are not rushing around all the time, and you're in a state that you can practice mindfulness in the deeper sense. You won't be able to go on to the deeper levels of mindfulness, really effectively, if your life's a chaos, if you can never find anything, if you're always late for appointments. It just chops you up too much, it keeps you buzzing too much, and that means that you won't be able to have deeper experiences very easily, yeah? So that's why I've written about day-to-day mindfulness. But the Buddha taught four spheres of mindfulness, and he didn't teach day-to-day mindfulness. He didn't have to send so many emails in those days. So the Buddha taught four spheres of mindfulness. So the first sphere that the Buddha teaches, the first area of our life that we need to become mindfulness, mindful of, is our body. And this is the sort of bedrock of mindfulness, really. It's really the bedrock of meditation. If you ever feel in a meditation, you don't quite know what to do. Sometimes you can get a bit confused by all the teachings that people bring to you about meditation. All you need to do is come back to your body. You just think, okay, I don't quite know where I am here in this meditation. I don't know what I can do, but just come back to my body. So your body is the anchor of your awareness, you know? And you can do it at any time. So as you listen to me now, just now, in this moment, you can start to become aware of your body. You can become aware of your weight on the cushions. Just as I am sitting talking to you, I can become aware of my body. And as soon as I do that, my sense of myself subtly changes. So you can become aware of your body in any moment, in a business meeting, in a difficult conversation, anywhere in life, you can just become aware of your body. And if you do that, your mind quietens down a bit, you know? So one of the main things I would say about body awareness is it gives you a perspective on your mind. Recently, I was talking to one of my nieces. I've got many nieces and nieces. And I was trying to, well, I wasn't convinced. I was trying to encourage one of my nieces to come on and retreat. And she said that she just thinks all the time. And she just, you know, that's really painful for her. And she just thinks all the time. And she thought that going on retreat, oh, no, more just thinking all the time. I just sit there and I'll think all the time. And that's really struck by that. That's what she feared would happen. So what I was trying to explain is that actually, no, you're first of all trying to become aware of your body, much more deeply and vividly aware of your body. And if you do that, you get a perspective on your thoughts. It's like you slightly step back from them. Very often, we're just kind of mixed up in them. And if we come mindful of the body, we get a bit of perspective on our thoughts. So that's one way of thinking about mindfulness of the body, is that having a perspective on the kind of things that are going through your mind, not just being all meshed up in them. And also body awareness is a simple antidote to stress. So if you start to feel stress, if you start to feel anxious, you can just bring your mind back into your body. And that's always the beginning. That's always where we start. But then as you deepen your awareness of your body, you start to notice that your body feels something. It feels either comfortable or uncomfortable or somewhere in between. In a way, that's too crude. You can think that the body has a whole range of feelings. And some of those feelings you group under the title uncomfortable, some of them you group under the title uncomfortable, some of them you can't decide what they are. So this is what's called mindfulness of vading now. So mindfulness of vading now is being aware of your experience in this sense of how does your experience feel. It doesn't mean how does your experience feel emotionally. It just means, does it feel on the pleasant spectrum? In which case, what kind of pleasant? 'Cause it feels on the unpleasant spectrum or is it somewhere in between you can't decide it. So mindfulness of vading now. So this is a second sphere of the Buddha's teaching. It's really, really central to the whole Buddhist vision of vading now is that you try to be with your experience. So if you start with body, body is a better way of coming back to your experience, of gaining perspective on your experience. Mindfulness of vading now is being with your experience instead of talking about it in your mind. So what happens to us is we have pleasant sensations and then we tend to kick off a whole narrative about that and one more of them. We want to repeat pleasant sensations. Pleasant sensations are naturally addictive, really. As soon as you have a pleasant sensation, you want to have another one. But the trouble is that tendency to repeat actually invitiates the pleasure that you experience. So for instance, I think I was saying the other week that when you have a square of chocolate, your second square of chocolate is only half as tasty as a first, yeah? Better, this is mine, folks. It's only half as tasty as it is. And by the time you've got to the third and fourth, you can hardly taste it at all. It's just become pure calories. And this is because, some of my friends are shaking ahead, (laughing) this is because your notice is kicks off to noon. So you're wired to be aware of newness. But we habituate really quickly. So something that is pleasant is only pleasant for a short period of time. It switches on as being pleasant and then switches off. And if you keep on trying to extend that pleasure, it won't work. In fact, if you keep on trying to repeat it, you'll get less and less pleasure each time. You get the law of diminishing returns. So mindfulness of vagueness is noticing pleasant sensation, really enjoying it, really savoring it. But inhibiting the desire to repeat it, which only visiates it, which it only pushes it away, actually, yeah. On the reverse of that, you have unpleasant sensations. And the tendency to unpleasant sensations is immediately to want to stop them. As soon as you experience something pleasant and pleasant, you want to stop it. And if it's somebody else that you think is causing unpleasant sensation, you want to stop them, yeah? But your desire to try to stop unpleasant experience tends to make it worse. The more you push away difficult experience, you get this kind of strange response where it makes it worse. So if you've got physical discomfort in your meditation, if you're trying to push it away, if you're trying to wish it away, you'll make it worse. So mindfulness of vagueness is about noticing the bare sensations of your experience. Being with those bare sensations without reacting to them, without either wanting more of them or pushing them away. It creates a vital gap between the experiences you have and the life you create. It's absolutely so central to Buddhism really. So it's about staying with your experience and instead of going into stories about your experience. But what we often notice is that we're in a story, don't we? So when we often stop to notice ourselves, we notice that we're already in the middle of a story. It's like, I think there's a whole thing we should think about stories, our interest in stories. I remember a while ago, going to a friend of one that had some rubbishy television on. Before I knew it, I wanted to find out what happened. And it was really dreadful. You could sort of predict what happened. And yeah, I sort of wanted to find out, oh, you know, whatever it is. We sort of really want, once we're in a story, we have this desire to get to the end of the story. Stories seem to me to be central to what it is to be human, is that we tell ourselves stories. And often when we notice ourselves, we notice that we're in the middle of a story about ourselves. We're a story about this kind of me, or that kind of me. I'm the kind of person who works all the time and nobody else does. I'm the kind of person who, whatever it is. We have all kinds of stories. People don't like me. People really think I'm fantastic. We have all kinds of stories in it. So the first sphere of mindfulness is mindfulness of chitta. This is translated something like heart mind. But I prefer to translate it simply for this purposes as the kind of things we tell ourselves. That chitta is the kind of thing we tell ourselves. The story, the south story, the narrative that we're invested in. And we usually are invested in it. It's a story that's trying to show ourselves as being the hero, or the villain, or whatever it is. We're invested in that story. So it's really important to notice our internal stories. So mindfulness of chitta is noticing the kind of things we say to ourselves. And it's trying to notice that what's happening is thoughts, not facts. And this is a really important distinction. It's a distinction that would seem fairly obvious. But actually, we don't notice it most of the time. We mix up thoughts with facts. So the classic example is you're walking down the street, you wave at a friend, and they don't wave back. And you think, oh, they don't like me. What is it? What have I done to have said? Oh, no. Those are. You go through all the last time you saw them. What did you say? And if you're not careful, you start to think, well, they really don't like me, then perhaps I'm a bad person. All those kind of narratives can kick off. I'm sure they don't for anybody here, but they can do. And you start to think that that actually is the case. You mix up your thoughts about perception with experience itself. So mindfulness is chitta. It's trying to notice that these are the kind of things you think that are not necessarily the actual facts that you're experiencing. It's really, really important, this mindfulness of chitta. And noticing the kind of things you say to yourself, because we tend to say to ourselves the same stories again and again. And it seems to me that those stories create and recreate us. It's those stories that make us who we are, because we keep telling the same stories to ourselves, even if they're painful stories. So mindfulness of chitta is about noticing those stories that we're telling ourselves, and just sort of stopping and reminding ourselves that there's a story. It's a thought. It's not a fact. Particularly, I even mentioned in my book, this question of rumination. So when we're ruminating about something, we're trying to solve a problem in our mind, but we're actually making it worse. So in that story, I just gave a thinking someone who doesn't like you, that you start thinking, why don't they like me? What is it about me? How can I get them to like me more? And you're trying to solve that problem, which is actually may just be a completely, mentally constructive problem. You're trying to solve that problem. But in doing so, you're making yourself feel worse and worse and worse. So rumination is what it's called, technically, aberrant problem-solving, where you go round and round and round, trying to solve a problem in your mind, but it actually makes it worse. So part of mindfulness of chitta is noticing when we're genuinely reflecting, and when we're ruminating. And ruminating is one of the factors that leads to depression. So that's mindfulness of chitta, at least. That's some things about mindfulness of chitta. And then finally, we move on to mindfulness of dharmas. So let's just go through that. So first of all, we become aware of our body. Then you start to become aware of how your body feels. Does it feel unpleasant or unpleasant, or kind of neutral? Then you start to notice that it's not just that you have these feelings in your experience, but you tend to tell stories about them. You tend to have narratives about them. And then you notice those narratives, and you actually start to investigate them. You actually start to make choices about how you respond to your narratives. So you could think of mindfulness of dharmas as to do with wise choices. Wise choices. You notice the kind of things that you're saying in your mind. And you actually start to consciously question the kind of things you say to yourself. So one of the classical examples of this is pessimism. When you instinctively have a pessimistic assumption about things, about yourself, about life, about whatever. And you start-- in mindfulness of chitta, you notice that you're into a pessimistic narrative. In mindfulness of dharmas, which I'm translating with bringing the teachings to mind, you consciously question your narrative. A bit like you would consciously question someone who was really having a go at you. You're never going to be any good at this. You're no good at that. If you really would say, hang on, is that true? You'd really, first of all, really challenge them and question them. So mindfulness of dharmas is a bit like that. You're consciously questioning your assumptions, predictions, beliefs, and so on to see if they're fruitful or not fruitful. Are they productive? Are they growthful? Do they help you grow and develop? Or are they unpredictable, unhelpful, and stop you growing and developing? So this is quite a practice in itself, really drawing yourself up short and questioning the kind of things you're saying. So you know that experience when you're going over an argument in your head. And you get more and more angry. You go over the argument in your head, and you stop and actually say that. And they'll say this, ah, next time I go through this. Well, you really sort of stop yourself in that narrative. You just say, hang on. So is this making me happy? Is this going to congeuse to a pleasant evening? Is this going to help anything? You try to really be much, much more consciously aware of what you say to yourself in your mind. And you make wise choices about how you respond. And it sounds sort of easy in practice. Because it's very, very difficult to practice. You need to be a horribly cultivated, quite considerable mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of sadhana, and mindfulness of chitta before you'll be able to really effectively practice mindfulness of dhammas, mindfulness of dhammas being, bringing to teaching the teaching to mind, remembering in the moment what you need to do. So you gain to a big anger thing. And you remember, here I am doing this. So can I just calm down? Can I think about this in another way? Am I thinking in all or nothing terms? Is it really as true as all that? One of the best ways to challenge the things you say to yourself in your mind is to ask yourself genuinely, is that true? Is what you're saying to yourself actually true, factually true? Really do that, you know? But you can only do that if you've already developed considerable mindfulness. I was going to say more about that, but perhaps we haven't got time. So funnily, I just wanted to say a bit more about this last sphere of mindfulness. So how I've spoken about it just then is mindfulness of dhammas, bringing the teaching to mind, remembering in the moment what's in your really best interests. So I, for instance, had this experience recently of going to a concert, and I had just had this difficult communication with someone. They just kept going round around in my mind and I was thinking, oh, they said that. And I could feel all that tension and animosity in my body. Interestingly, when we rumour like this, when we go over an argument in our mind, our body reacts as if the argument is actually happening. So it's not just you literally run it like a film and that you're untouched by, but your body does all the same sort of things as if you are currently having that argument. So think how many times you end up having that argument. You go over it and over it and over it. And each time your body kicking off as if you're now having that argument. Remember, walking to this concert, go into this argument. And I really said to myself, my program, this is it. This is a moment to bring mindfulness of dharma's to bear. This is it. This is not for your book. This is not for this film. This is not to tell people at the class. This is it now. Do it now. You know, here we are. And I stopped myself literally in the street and was like grabbing myself from the shoulders. And I just thought, now, where is this leading? This is leading to a really awful evening. And I just got out of it. I just thought, come on, you can do it. Let's just stop. Let's get out. And it was like, I don't know whether you saw the Spider-Man film where he pulls off that horrible black rubber suit that's over his Spider-Man suit. It was like that. It was like pulling off this kind of thing that had kind of engulfed me, this being engulfed by negativity. And I just sort of pulled it off. And I had this really happy evening. It's one of the happiest evenings I've had for ages. I felt radially happy. I got to the concert. Well, as soon as I got to the concert, I realized I'd been to the concert the night before. It was the same concert. So I hadn't been playing for in days of late times. And then I thought, I've left my coat in the other room and I hadn't brought my coat. It was mad, you know, there's work yet to do, you know. I hope you're not thinking on some sort of saint. But it was really, really happy. All these things went wrong, but I enjoyed everything. It's like I just, for that evening, I was liberated from that habit of going over and over this story, which somehow was making me and me somebody that always has things difficult going on with and therefore people should feel sorry for, you know. I kind of liberated myself from that into just being all right and being happy was great. So I don't know why I've got into that anyway. That's my thought. That's how I've been talking about it. But Buddhist practice goes much deeper than that, goes much further than that. It's saying, actually, your whole sense of self, who you think you are, is a story. There isn't anything else. All the stories we tell ourselves about our past, about who we are now, about the kind of things we like and dislike about our future, they're just stories. There's not, there's no being there, there's no self, no unchanging, permanent, fixed self, that those stories are kind of circulating around. They've just seen stories. And if you liberate yourself from those stories, you liberate yourself from yourself, you know. So mindfulness of dharma is in this way. It's about mindfulness of dharma as in mindfulness of the nature reality. So mindfulness of dharma means bringing to mind the teachings. In this sense, mindfulness of dharma means bringing to mind the truth. And that might sound a bit sort of metaphysical and a bit gone to this sort of capital truth thing. But what it means is that you bring to mind how things really are and how are things really and how things really are is they change all the time that they are changing. It's not even that they change because it's not a series of events that one event starts and then ends and then another one comes in. All you've got is change. Everything that we look at, everything we feel, everything we think, everything we are, even the very cells in our body, are constantly changing. And we are constantly trying to say, no, no, no. There's a me in the middle of all this. There's a me and it's really important to me this me. And I'm trying to protect this me. And I'm trying to get things for this me. And that's not changing. That's fixed, that's straight. I can find this me. But if you look for this me, it just keeps on evaporating away. It's like clouds changing or something. There's just changing, yeah? So with mindfulness of dominance, it's bringing to mind all the mindfulness that you've cultivated on the whole path of awareness to look deeper and deeper into what's really happening. And what's really happening is change. What's really happening now, now, now is change. Nothing else has happened, just change. So in mindfulness of domers, you really see change. And especially, you see that words can't say anything about change. 'Cause words can only say this or that. It can only say now and then. They can't talk about change. It's a bit like when you're a child, you might have looked at clouds and the sky and you think, "Oh, it looks like a duck." And it looks like an amphibious landing craft. And it looks like a garden shed, as may imaginative child. It looks like a face, it looks like a dragon. But if you imagine, that's what we do to life. Life is constantly changing. We say it's a cup, it's a tree, it's a me, it's my mother. It's a cushion, yeah? We try to fix them like that. And especially, we fix ourselves like that. But as you were to watch the clouds more and more deeply, as you became more aware of them, more and more, you'd see that, it's just as it's becoming a dragon, it becomes a bird, it becomes a fish, it becomes a flower. And eventually, you can't say anything about it at all. There is just changing this and you can't put words to it. You can't name it because you can't name change. So Buddhism is saying that there's an insight in that, it's completely liberating, it liberates you from everything, which is to do with seeing that there is just change. And there's nothing you can hang on that change. There's no words about it. You can't say anything about it, but you can experience it. And that experience is incredibly profound. And it changes the whole nature of your experience. It changes your relationship to everything in the world. Especially, it means that you become compassionate to all others and you become wise, you know? So that's the goal of Buddhism, you could say. That's what the Buddha represents. It's someone who's seen that there is only ever changing with no things that are changing, especially no me that it's changing. So that's the whole path of mindfulness. You start with day-to-day mindfulness. The simple things are small things of everyday life that cause us so much frustration and angst if we don't attend to them. Then there's mindfulness of your body, which is about really bringing yourself into your body so you get a perspective on your mind and as an antidote to stress. Then there's mindfulness of vedinar, the feeling tone of your experience. So you don't just try to repeat pleasant experiences or push away unpleasant experiences. Then there's mindfulness of chitta, your mind, the kind of things you say to yourself in your mind, especially your tendency to ruminate. Then there's mindfulness of dharma bringing the teaching to mind. What do you need to do in this moment to help yourself be happy and grow and develop? What do you need to do now in this moment? And then there's mindfulness of the nature of reality, which is just change. (upbeat music) We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
