The
great Indian spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti [pictured right] spoke a lot about mindfulness without hardly ever mentioning the word. Listen to these words from his wonderful book Freedom From the Known:
‘Attention is not the same thing as concentration.
Concentration is exclusion; attention, which is total awareness, excludes
nothing. It seems to me that most of us are not aware, not only of what we are
talking about but of our environment, the colours around us, the people, the
shape of the trees, the clouds, the movement of water.’
Concentration
is fixed and focused in a particular moment. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is
a moment-to-moment activity … from
one moment to the next and then the next and then the next and so on.
Of course, we all need to concentrate from time to time on
what we are doing. For example, we may be trying to balance a set of accounts
or solve a legal or similar problem. We certainly need to concentrate when we’re
engaged in any such activity. However, we do not need to concentrate as such each and every second of each and
every minute of each and every hour of each and every day. What we need to do
is to be attentive and aware of what’s happening in and around us.
A concentrated
mind is anything but an attentive and aware mind. The concentrated mind excludes
everything other than that the subject of your concentration. Awareness, on the
other hand, is never exclusive. It is
inclusive, universal and all-encompassing. Mindfulness
— that is, bare (that is, diffused
and unconcentrated) attention and choiceless
(that is, non-judgmental and non-interpretative) awareness — is the direct,
immediate and unmediated perception of ‘what is’ … as it actually happens from
one moment to the next!
When we concentrate on something, we are totally
blind, that is, inattentive, to all other things. Those other things quickly
become the past without our ever having experienced them. Don’t let reality — that
is, what happens from one moment to the next — die on you. Don’t experience it as a past event.
Otherwise, you will instantly lose the immediacy, directness and actuality of the experience.
The Buddha advised
us to observe and watch closely ... that is, mindfully ... whatever
is occurring in time and space in the here-and-now, in the moment, from one
moment to the next. Not only watch, but the Buddha went on to say,
‘and firmly and steadily pierce it.’
So, my friends, pierce
the
reality of each here-and-now moment-to-moment experience. Be attentive and aware. Only then can you say you are alive and no longer living in
the past. Only then can you truly say you are living mindfully.
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