Instructions given to this audience of great teachers and new monastics would ensure the broad dissemination of the teachings. It begins with a gathering of well-known and highly respected disciples of the Buddha, each of whom were themselves guiding newer monastics. The opening section of the Anapanasati Sutta sets the stage for this important teaching. Anapanasati is widely considered to be one of the most important meditation subjects taught in the early discourses of the Buddha. Anapana is the Pali word for breathing sati is the word for mindfulness. The Buddha’s teachings in the Discourse on Mindfulness of Breathing, the Anapanasati Sutta, include a set of sixteen step-by-step instructions that together map a comprehensive, joyful, and liberating path. The broad appeal and availability of this practice is breathtaking! By skillfully utilizing the natural breath, any person, monastic or lay, can realize the fruit of awakening. It is recommended for both beginners and accomplished meditators. The Buddha’s practice of mindfulness of the breath does not require extraordinary zeal or physical strength, nor does one need advanced education or ritual blessing. Since the Buddha himself enjoyed practicing mindfulness of breathing, this practice is sometimes called the “Tathagatha’s dwelling.”
#Undistracted mind portable
Observing the breath is a portable vehicle for developing mindfulness, calmness, and deep understanding.Īlthough meditators before the Buddha engaged in various kinds of breath control practices, the Buddha taught a uniquely effective practice of mindfulness of breathing as a complete approach to awakening. By observing the experience of breath, habitual attraction toward sensual thrills quickly subsides and the mind becomes still, refreshed, tranquil, and equanimous. Mindfulness of breath is a simple method to extricate our attention from proliferating thoughts about daily activities, obsessive plans for personal projects, and agitating reactions to the barrage of sensory and social encounters that occur every day. Observing the breath is a portable vehicle for developing mindfulness, calmness, and deep understanding.
It can be used in conjunction with a wide variety of practices to steer attention away from distractions and anchor attention on a present experience. The breath offers meditators a versatile meditation subject based on the ordinary, accessible experience of breathing in and breathing out.
It may soon be yesterday’s mind.I have been fond of mindfulness of breathing since I began meditating in the early 1980s. As supple as it is subtle, it’s been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. The feelings are intoxicating-so much so that they can distract us from the Net’s deeper cognitive consequences.įor the last five centuries, ever since Gutenberg’s printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the center of art, science, and society. John Batelle, a onetime magazine editor and journalism professor who now runs an online advertising syndicate, has described the intellectual fission he experiences when skittered across Web pages: ‘When I am performing bricolage in real time over the course of hours, I am ‘feeling’ my brain light up, I ‘feeling like I’m getting smarter.’ Most of us have experienced similar sensations while online. What we’re trading away in return for the riches of the Net-and only a curmudgeon would refuse to see the riches-is what Karp calls ‘our old linear thought process.’ Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts-the faster, the better. “We seem to have arrived, as McLuhan said we would, at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different modes of thinking.
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