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2.4. Training Awareness

So far, we have covered a few different mediation exercises.

  1. The individual meditations on each sense are helpful to clearly delimit the boundaries of each type of sense experience.

  2. The meditation on open awareness is helpful to orientate you towards a skilful way of interacting with the world, with full attention to what is happening.

  3. Naming the channel is helpful to improve differentiation between fast occurring, seemingly unified sense experiences.

  4. Focusing on dual and multi-sense experiences is helpful to further differentiate types of experience.

These guided meditations are a useful starter kit to point you in the right direction, namely, being able to maintain mindfulness throughout the day with a clear understanding of sense experience.

Anytime anywhere

Paying attention to the senses is something that can be done anytime, anywhere. You don't need any special posture, equipment, outfits, gadgets, or team members to do it. There are so many times in normal daily life when you're not actively engaging in something that requires all your mental capacity. Use your many moments of free time to come back to these simple exercise of knowing the six fields of experience. Not only can it be relaxing, it is a mentally healthier alternative to mind-wandering or worrying.

There are so many times during the day that are open for this practice. There's no excuse of, "I don't have time to meditate".

  • Waking up in bed, you can feel your body, you can examine your mind, you can pay attention to the world of sounds.
  • Going to the bathroom is a meditation exercise with the Buddha's own stamp of approval on it.
  • Eating your breakfast is a feast of sense experience
  • Walking down the street is a great exercise in multisensory meditation.

What you'll be replacing is idle thought, daydreaming, mind-wavering, useless speculation, worrying and fretting, memories of the past, imagination about the future, all the things that normally fill your spare moments. You can replace them with simple sense experience and immediately and very tangibly reduce your mental noise, increase your peace of mind and cultivate a much richer inner experience.

If you get nothing else from this course, please develop this one skill of coming back to the senses. It is so enormously useful, not only in daily life, but as a foundation for all deeper states of meditation.

Turning Attention into a Superpower

Focusing the mind sounds simple, right? Even kids can do it for a moment. The hard part is maintaining awareness. You'll only discover when you first engage in trying to do it.

Anyone who begins a meditation practice discovers for themselves that the mind is much more chaotic and unruly than they could have previously imagined. Meditation doesn't make the mind like that, it just helps you to see how scattered it is naturally, something you previously never noticed before.

With time, with practise, with repetition, the mind can be conditioned to stay with experience, for minutes, then for longer periods. The more you exercise this ability, the stronger it grows. Ultimately, the mind can be trained to stay with experience continuously whenever required. This small act of adverting attention can be turned into a superpower.

What most people don't realise is that this isn't about achieving some mystical state, although those can happen. It's about getting to know your own internal world, which many people are really strangers to.

This is a very reliable outcome of awareness training that many meditators progress to. Through these basic exercises, it is possible to become aware of much more detail, with much more clarity than you are experiencing right now. One's inner world becomes an ever richer one.

More importantly, it is possible to have mental balance and equanimity in the face of life's ups and downs. This level of composure is impossible to even imagine for someone on the roller-coaster of reaction and over-reaction to their own sense experience.

Training the body vs training the mind

Physical training is slow and predictable. If you're getting in shape, you might improve your speed or strength by a small percentage in a month. Maybe you'll run 10% faster or lift a bit more weight. That's just how body training works.

But the mind is an entirely different story. While your body inches forward, your mind can leap forward dramatically. In just a few weeks of consistent practice, you could potentially double or even triple your mental capabilities. And these mental gains stick around much longer than physical improvements.

This is why meditators always talk about practice. Reading about mindfulness is like looking at a map, it orientates you in the right direction. But actually practising is like walking the road. The experience transforms you in ways you can't even imagine.

Here's the crucial thing: without practice, nothing changes. You can read a thousand books about meditation, but that's like reading cookbooks without ever cooking. Theory is nice, but practical application is everything. The real insights happen when you actually undertake the process of mental training.

What most people don't realise is that what is called 'mindfulness' in the modern world is really just the tip of the iceberg. It's merely the starting point for the deep mental training that's been preserved in the Buddhist monastic community for millennia.

Following this course onwards, you will see for yourself that mindfulness is just a necessary prerequisite for much more profound experiences that are possible though directing attention to the simple understanding of what is happening right now.

Q&A

Q: Do you have any questions or doubts at this point?

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