What happens when mindfulness matures? Weand#8217;re completely familiar with mindfulness, and weand#8217;ve hardly scratched the surface. What connects us to our own unfolding nature? Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, Maturing Mindfulness, is an intimate look into the Anapanasati Sutra with Dhammarati in the sparkling talk Breaking the Mould, an indispensable exploration of everyday practice of the Dharma in the beautiful light of the Tathagathagarbha Sutra.
Talk given at FWBO Day, London 2003
[Music] Dharma Bites 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. [Music] Once again, finish with one example of mindfulness, right? We think in mindfulness, I don't want to caricature it too much. You know, it means being a bit quiet going through those carefully. The most, it means a little bit more sort of a tend to open awareness to what our experience is. But we've got some glimmering of what mindfulness is. We've been looking at a text recently called the Anapanasati Sutter. And what the Anapanasati Sutter does is it talks you through what happens with mindfulness matures and it says it starts off, you're aware of your breath. It goes from there to awareness of your body. If you're aware of your body, that matures and your body calming. If your body comes, it's pleasurable in matures and in experience of pleasure. If that pleasure starts to calm down, you move into an experience of bliss. On the basis of the experience of bliss, you start to be very, very precisely aware of all the movements of your own mind. You take awareness into that and the same thing happens to your mind that's happened to your body. All the mental processes start to calm and distill. On the basis of that stillness, the verse says, gladdening the mind, I breathe in. Gladdening the mind, I breathe out. On the basis of that experience of gladness, to be the nagas around them. For the experience of steadying the mind, I breathe in. Stedying the mind, I breathe out. From there, the steadying becomes liberating. Liberating becomes awareness of impairments. You start to notice the impairment and nature of all your experience. Because it's impairment, it's ridiculous to hang on to. So relinquishing experience, I breathe in. Focusing on relinquishing, I breathe out. You let it go and it moves from there to finally liberation. I'm sorry for holding in a whole new sutra. The one point that I wanted to make is we're completely familiar with mindfulness and we've hardly scratched the surface. There's an experience there. It's presenters a technique, but in a sense it's not a technique at all. What it is is a description of how mindfulness matures when it's a sustained experience. When we start to manage to establish ourselves in a sustained, attentive mental state, you set in motion a process that moves from simple awareness of your experience into something that unfolds this deeper nature. It's true of the other four things, it's true of positive emotion. You know the mat above now. What it's saying is that there's a spectrum that goes all of the way from a little bit more emotional sense of the day to the completely sincere feeling, the well-being of other beings, matters to us as much as our own well-being does. There's a spectrum there that we can move down. That spectrum's there in all those dimensions. What is it that connects us to other people? What connects us to this sense of our own unfolding nature? How does that express itself in all of our action? How does it affect our relationships with people or response to them? A very strong, altruistic streak runs right through the taggot of garbage. There's one little phrase in it where it says, "If you don't spend too much time in the meditation hall and dedicate yourself to liberating beings, you'll reach the highest attainment." There's a whole spectrum of experience that what we have to do is to start to just engage with, step by step. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]
