2 other aspects of wise or skillful attention concern the intervals before an action and after you have acted. It's quite a useful experiment with telling results to attend to your intention(s) before an either verbal, bodily or mental action. That means that you take a step back once you notice being about to say, do or think something. Why am I really doing, saying or thinking that? And is there more than one obvious intention driving this? So really take your time to check internally what is really going on, before you say or do or even think something. And then evaluate if what you are about to say or do is wholesome or unwholesome. Is it with the intent to benefit or harm the other being or myself? When I experimented with this I at first stopped in my tracks more often than not. This, as does all real Dhamma practice, takes a great amount of patience and honesty.
The second kind of wise attention is related to the first one. It is attending to the results of an action, again either verbally, bodily or mentally, on your body, heart and mind both in the short and the long run. Are there things I do regularly or that I really love to do, that are actually quite unskillful or harmful to my body, to the state of mind, to the heart? Am I getting more or less anxious, sensitive, calm or compassionate when the results of my actions kick in? And again with great determination let those activities, words or thoughts go that are not conducive to inner or outer wellbeing, calmness, peacefulness and compassion, and cultivate those that are.

(un)wise attention

This topic is so important and at the same time has so many implications and side-tracks to consider, that I will probably come back to it in later blog-entries to add nuances and other fine-attunements that will be overlooked here.

What did the Buddha mean by this term: wise attention? Why was it so central to his teaching that it pops up in so many places in the Nikayas? And how is it cultivated not just in meditation but in everyday life activities?

The term wise attention refers to the careful choosing on which things, topics or characteristics we focus on in our minds. What to think about, what to ponder upon, to hein in on and what to put aside, leave behind or lay down for now, dependent on the results this focus has on our state of mind. So mindfulness is central to being even able to discern our own state of mind when we engage in different topics, discussions, thoughts and activities. But not just the mind, also how we feel inside our bodies. So this takes quite some practice to learn from our experience through try and error. What is the state of mind when you watch the news? How is your heartrate effected when you see violence in a movie or a romantic scene? What makes you get goosebumps on your upper arms or tickling down your back? How do you feel after you eat? What kinds of food taste great but have unhealthy consequences? What brings short-term sense-gratification but long-term unease or distress? All that and much more is part of practicing wise attention.

When somebody critizised you, what happens in your mind and body when you sit at home hours later, thinking back to the event and following thoughts as: "Who is he/she to tell me that?", "She is so wrong, I am so right!" or "She always does that."? We are so used to having those thoughts in the first place, and allowing them to obesess us, to dwell on them and feeling in the right to do so, that we hardly notice that we are creating our own suffering. The event is long gone, the other person probably doesn't even think about it anymore or maybe not even noticed how offensive or hurtful those words were. But you sit there and not only relive the event time and time again, it even gets distorted and made worse in your mind, than it actually was. One word can cause us to hate somebody intensively for the rest of our lives. And the reason for that is firstly lack of mindfulness and secondly wrong attention. Right and wrong are quite unpopulare in spiritual circles these days, and not without reason. There is no inherent right or wrong in the universe, but in respect to our wellbeing and release from suffering, there are quite sustinct rights and wrongs. The basic question the Buddha asked and that you must ask yourself in every situation is: do I want to suffer or do I want to be free?

Instead of "wrongly" focussing on how stupid or inconsiderate the other person was by saying those things, you have a choice here, to re-direct your focus on the feeling of suffering itself in the body and on the sourse of it. Stepping back and taking a look like that takes a lot of effort and mindfulness. So right this moment there is your choice on how you want to spend the next hours: wallowing in your hurt and making plans of revenge and feeling sorry for yourself OR going into your body and tracking the sensation of hurt, it's center in your stomache, your forehead, your solarplexus, your lower abdomen or your physical heart and purposefully feeling the feeling in all its nuances. This in itself takes all the mental stress away of judging, lamenting and story-telling we are all so used to. I know that there is bound to arise the sense of giving the other person a pass on his wrong behaviour, on giving up one's rightness and loosing one's selfrespect. But again, the really important thing to consider is what are the actual, factual, sense-able consequences for your state of body and mind if you hold on to these? Another way of putting it is, do you want to be happy and free or do you want to be right? The universal answer I heard from anyone I asked that question was: both! But in truth you can't have both. It is either or, whether you like it or not. Because in order for you to be right, there must be somebody wrong. That in itself is a cause of suffering, this sense of separation, this believe in a self that is separate from the other. And apart from that, the one who got set into the wrong by your being right will probably not entirely forget about the issue and seek ways to pay you back by setting you into the wrong and regaining the upper hand.

In this way victorious military invasions in the past and present have always had the bitter taste of having sewn the seeds of future revenge. This can also be taken to a smaller, personal scale or to national, international warfare. But back to the topic of this blogentry.

In your daily life, what do you pay attention to? What do you deem worth of your energy and focus? Are those things conducive to your long term happiness, ease and health or to stress, suffering and dis-ease? In order to answer these questions you need relentless honesty and discernment. Some things that feel easeful or rewarding might actually wield uncomfortable results in the long run. Let's take watching the news.

Right at the beginning I admit that I consciously chose to stop following the news about ten years ago. And my life did not come to a sudden stop and everything I really needed to know came to my knowledge anyhow. Almost everyone I talked about that to, said that they don't want to give up their sense of being informed. That would give them the feeling of closing the eyes to the problems of the world. But you need to carefully consider this. Are the news an actual mirror of what the world is like or is it a small, carefully chosen part of reality certain people want you to see? Who chooses what to show and what to leave out? Why? How many people are interviewed on a certain topic on the street and how many of those actually make it into the program? Again, why? Is there really anything new in the "news" or is it essentially the same stuff that kept the world spinning centuries or even millenia ago?

But the even more important questions are: how does watching the news affect how you see the world and how you feel and how you act? Does it make you feel more at ease, safe and happy or do you get scared or feel despair in regard to the future? Do you grow more loving and compessionate or more distrustful and drawn back? Are you in the present moment when and after you watch the news? There is nothing wrong with being informed and knowing things, if what you get informed about is actually important and unavoidable. How many people develop a sense of powerlessness in regard to solving the economic, ecologic and social problems of our times? Shrugging stuff off, closing their eyes and drifting off through all this overdose of things to care and worry about? How many people know more about happenings on other continents then about what happens right infront of their doorsteps? We know instantly when something explodes in near-east, but read about the death of our neighbour in the newspaper a week later.

So those were two things of many to consider when cultivating wise attention: instead of paying attention to what moved us in negative or positive ways you can refer it back to awareness, sensing the resultant feelings in the body instead of going into the habitual storytelling of the poor me or the grand me. And secondly checking the ways in which societal and cultural habits and conformaties influence our reality, our actions, our views and re-actions. I'll be back for more, but that's a lot to take in for now, I guess.

spiritual urgency vs. wordly complacency

One of the most interesting and motivating but at the same time often quite challenging themes, the Buddha time and again urged to contemplate is a sense of spiritual urgency. What does this refer to, what is important about it? It's closely related to the uncomfortable fact of our mortality. We live our life as if we had all the time in the world to rather indulge in the fruitless pursuit of sense pleasures for the sake if immediate gratification instead of training our minds to develop mindfulness of body, feelings, mind and phenomena to prepare for the inevitable approach of the end of our lifes. Nobody wants to think about that! Why bother? I'm still young and need not worry about it. I want to enjoy the world, want to experience so many things, travel to so many places, I simply don't have time to care about dying. But have you ever seen anyone finding unending joy through satisfaction of any amount of sense pleasures? Is there any celebrity worth millions of dollars, who is really happy without a single care in the world? How many ultra rich people killed themselves through drugs? Just imagine all your wishes being fulfilled and then seeing that you are still not satisfied, still feeling lack, boredom or depression. There is a saying: getting everything you want is the most terrible fate you can experience. So people have sacrificed 20, 30, 40 or even more years of their lifes working their butts off in order to being able to enjoy old age. Has this really worked out for anyone? How many died before going into retirement? How many were shocked at the state their old bodies were in just now that the fun was finally due to begin? Is there any one old person who wakes up even one single day not being in some kind of bodily or mental pain? Sure, there are better days than others. How many old people wish in hindsight, to having made better use of the time they would still have been able to meditate, to become enlightened, to make an end of suffering? So I encourage you, like the Buddha did in so many instances, to make the best use of the time you have left, starting right now. In one sutta the Buddha asked his monks how they were developing mindfulness of death. The first one said something like, if I had one year to attend to the words of the Blessed One, I would reap great benefits from that. The second one, half a year, then down to a month, a week, a day, 2 hours, 1 hour, the time it takes to eat a whole meal until the last two answered, if they had time for taking and swallowing one spoonful of a meal and the time it takes to take one in- and out breath. The Buddha's answer might shock you, but that is the goal of the discourse. He said all but the last two monks were negligent of the practice, heedless and needed to make more effort. Only the last two were practicing in accordance with his teaching.
Many people I meet, in fact everyone, makes the same mistake as all the monks the Buddha reproached in that sutta. Meditation is worthwhile, they say, and I really want to make an effort. But more often than not, there is a good and compelling reason why other things come first. They don't have time to practice, there are so many responsibilities, that they will at first tackle before coming back to meditation. I recommend that you become watchful of these things, ask yourself over and over again, what is really important. Is this other thing really worth my time? What would I do if I knew that my life ends tomorrow, in 2 hours or even after 10 more breath? Enlightenment and freedom from suffering are real possibilities, there is a way to get rid of ignorance and defilements, to realize Nibban. Being negligent of the practice is not the way of a worthy person, of a noble disciple of the Buddha. Do I wat o be free or do I want to stay in the endless cycle of birth, old age, sickness and death?

How is mindfulness practice translated into everyday life?

First of all, what is meant by the term "mindfulness"? Most people understand it in a limited and limiting way of just being aware of the present moment experience. But even though that in itself is a huge task and an enormous challenge for the average person, it is just part of the requirements to live up to the standard put up by the Enlightened One. In my understanding, mindfulness implies a continuous willingness to be and stay with anything that arises in order to see it clearly, to understand its dynamics and to than evaluate the best, the most wholesome way to deal with it. And that's where it gets tricky. Being with any kind of experience without judging or criticizing it, can easily be misread as "nothing really matters, be equanimous with any sort of sensation, feeling or interaction with other people". Then enlightenment can be seen as unwavering happiness, bliss and not caring. But as a matter of fact, even the Buddha experienced physical pains and sorrows, so what is really meant by mindfulness? It's the understanding that all phenomena, whether pleasant, painful or neutral, they all have 3 universal characteristics. Impermanence, stressfulness and not-self. Take your time and contemplate whether this is truly the case or not. Is there anything never changing, endlessly satisfying and fit to be called you or yours? There is a succession in these 3 characteristics, which makes it more sensible or obvious. Because everything is changing, no matter how pleasant or painful, it's unreliable and leading to suffering either when it subsides or, if unpleasant, right at the spot of its arising. So this is quite crucial! With unpleasant or painful experiences we easily see the stressfulness or suffering in them. But to understand that also pleasant and enticing sense pleasures are inherently stressful and leading to suffering, because of their impermanent nature. So wanting pleasures to stay indefinitely is equally deluded as wishing unpleasant or painful experiences to stop and go away. Through extensive mindfulness practice in meditation and contemplation one can slowly and steadily strengthen the mind and heart to step back from any sense experience and see their impermanent, stressful and selfless nature. Joseph Goldsteins Teacher called it very pointedly "empty phenomena rolling on". Because everything is unstable and stressful, nothing is fit to be called "I, me or mine". So one recommendation I offer is to train yourself in taking a step back whenever you become aware of an experience and instead of thinking "I am happy" or "I'm angry" or "I'm sad" or even "I want this or that" to refrase it internally to: "There is happiness, anger or sadness present". "There is wanting or aversion". This process allows you to become centered and stable enough to look at what is actually happening and to investigate the 3 universal characteristics of impermanence, stressfulness and not-selfness. The more often you can do that and see for yourself, the more everything opens up to make life a lot broader, richer and less stressful. Try it out. Come and see.

the core of the Buddha's teaching

Aniccä vatha sankhärä

Uppäda vaya dhamminö

Uuppajjitvä nirujjhanti

Te san vüpa samö sukhö

 

• All things are impermanent
• They arise and pass away
• Having arisen they come to an end
• Their coming to peace is bliss 

These few sentences alone can have and, according to the suttas of the Pali canon, have had transformative impact on those ready to penetrate to the deepest truths. Just by hearing that utterance from the mouth of the Buddha, many spiritual seekers attained liberation. What is so powerful about it and how can one directly experience this in meditation and daily life?

On a conceptual level we all know this, right? Sure, nothing is everlasting. So what? Get me the next kick.

If truly understood, this fact of impermanence of all things that enter our field of experience, one sees that one will not find what one wants in anything at all. Not in the most delicious food, in an exhilaratingly beautiful partner in bed, in a really captivating movie, not even in the deepest meditation. So one can start to ask oneself, each time a deep longing for any kind of experience: do I really need this? Knowing that whatever it is, it won't bring me lasting happiness and fulfillment. In meditation it is tremendously revealing to stay alert to the arising and passing away of any sense contact. Hearing a sound, seeing an object, smelling an aroma, tasting a flavor, sensing a touch or thinking a thought or memory; it's all coming and going, sooner or later every experience dissolves into thin air. So there is an opening to a choice. Do I react to it or not? Do I need to do something about it, or not. Cultivating this attitude over time leads to greater ease and tranquility even amidst the greater challenges of human existence.

Am I a Buddhist?

Am I a Buddhist?

Certainly not. When people ask me that question, I always answer: No, but a great fan of the Buddha! After studying and practicing the Dhamma of the Theravada Tradition, I came to see that this path led me not just deeper then any other spiritual or esoteric tradition, but it actually keeps its promise to guide the ones who practice it to full liberation, to unshakeable peace, to freedom independent of outer conditions, to the end of suffering, to the Deathless, to Nibbana.