We're going to focus on mantra, mindfulness, how they interact, and how their interaction applies to your life and happiness. You should know about this because our human nature has a serious flaw, and you may not be aware of this problem. Short and simple, meditation means awareness. Mindfulness, mantra, sentience... They are inseparable aspects of consciousness and the wide spectrum of awareness – meditation. Learning meditation therefore equals learning about your consciousness and developing a keen awareness of who you are and how you're doing. But what is a mantra and what is mindfulness? A mantra is a point of concentration - such as a phrase, word, sound, guiding principle, or slogan. Mantra is attachment. Mindfulness is detachment, encompassing the points of focus as well as the space between them. Let's now illustrate and compare mindfulness to mantra and see how they interact in a sunny beach analogy… So, within the wide spectrum of awareness, mantra is the concentrated, attached, and narrow focus. Standing on a beach, extremely concentrated, mantra is the zoomed-in, close-up view of a grain of sand. Mindfulness is the w-i-d-e screen, the detached focus. In practice it's also a patient, non-judgmental attitude. If mantra is the close-up of a grain of sand, mindfulness is the entire beach. Mindfully zooming out now, there are countless grains of sand, even rolling waves, an ocean -- A HUGE picture! Mindfully detached from any particular aspect of this picture yet fascinated by it, zooming in and out... The ocean seems to breathe, waves come and go, pulling out and returning sand to the beach... A pelican dives to catch a fish... Two children make a sand castle, a wave demolishes it... They cry and the mother comes running, scared first then she laughs with relief... Three teens turn to see what she's laughing at, then return to their game of Frisbee... You get my point – the mindful, large perspective shows how interconnected the "close-up shots" of the huge picture are. How beautiful they are apart and especially together. Mindfulness and mantra interact in a dynamic, fluid manner. The person always learning to meditate is able to move freely along the spectrum of awareness and freely observe and feel his world. This freedom goes far beyond concepts, boxing in and dividing up the experience of real-time life. Detached mindfulness brings you closer to nature and life, not farther away from it. This is healthy and relaxing. On the other hand, getting stuck on rigid goals, focusing on things to come, money, narrow-minded beliefs - attached, narrow concentration - are stressful approaches to living. Yet it's an all too common thing that we tend to do. Properly learning meditation, we need to be able to detach ourselves from this flaw... The Human Problem: UNnatural Attachment We can never predict exactly where we're going. Trying to control natural progress hampers our ability to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Richard Dawkins bluntly puts the human problem in this way in his excellent book, River out of Eden: "Homo sapiens is a deeply purpose-ridden species." We should be mindful of our human, purpose-ridden nature and occasionally practice detachment from goals and narrow perspectives. Rigid, stressful goal-setting can be detrimental to your progress (and happiness) because it doesn't open up for inevitable change and great, unexpected opportunities. It can make you stressed, frustrated, feeling like you're losing control. And it can slow you down. Be mindful of this problem also while you meditate. As the waves of the ocean, as your own breath, thoughts (mantras) come and go. But you don't have to attach yourself to them. Mindfulness is the smart attitude that includes every mantra. Learning meditation the smart way, you need to be aware of both, and you should always show love and compassion for your own human nature. Have patience with yourself in your meditation and in your life. Time, after all, is far more than just money.
I found your description of the interconnectedness of life through something as mundane as a seaside on a summers day, really very beautiful and relevant to the focus of modern people. Nicely done Oz. Circle eace:
This mindfulness is key to discovering the nature of the mind. For all things have a microscopic and macroscopic scale. So then does the mind. The individual consciousness as we perceive it is a narrow view on a much greater mind. This explains loss of ego experiences as well as the "not-self" in buddhism.
