Mindfulness and Mindlessness

The essay below was written for my book and, like many others, was not put on this site. Some of the notions from it have been coming up with some frequency this past year so it seems like the time to bring it back. I am leaving it unchanged. Though my views on mindfulness have changed just a bit, what I am pointing to remains the same.

Here I’m going to create a distinction between some types of attention. They are very different but have some interestingly similar traits.

The Witness state is a state of mindlessness, in fact a state solely of witnessing. There is no thinking there, no frequencies, no mind, nothing of any kind. Distinctions are available just outside the threshold of this place, but not within. One thing that is very clear is that there is no Justin there, nor anything or anyone else. It is assumed, upon exiting, that time has passed, but there is no knowing how much.

Then there is the immersion in pleasure or grace – appreciating or being appreciated, which I’ve described as the downward flow of particles. Immersion in this experience also tends to be mindless. The more one lets go into the flow, the more pleasure/bliss there is but the less self-awareness there is. Any “Oh my god this is good” seems to be expressed after being completely “lost” in the experience. Identity tends to disappear in that flow of pleasure, though it may be very brief. When lying down on the grass to enjoy a sunny spring day, sleep often lies on the distant side of that pleasure. Sleep is an energetic outreach in the same direction as grace – tapping up and allowing in – and though it is somewhat different in feel, I think they are related.

I see Mindfulness as clearly different than the two outlined above. How many things can you be attentive to at one time? Let’s say you are in a restaurant eating a hot egg roll. If you intend to be “mindful” you could pay attention to every way in which your tongue moves the food around to dissipate the heat, what the teeth are coming into contact with, the sounds of chewing something crunchy, the consistency of the filling or the shell, or the flavors that most jump out at you or the more subtle ones. You could just pay attention to one portion of the shell at the fold, which is particularly hard. What does it mean to be mindful? As with frequencies, the possibilities are immense. Every moment of life can be experienced in an infinite number of ways, and it is all a matter of where your focus of attention is. So being mindful appears to be a choice of where to put one’s full attention. If you are fully engaged on any one thing, like perhaps the sound of chewing in this case, being deliberately mindful can silence the mind to a great degree. It is full attention on one particular thing. Keeping it focused there, however, will typically require continuous intent.

I once had an experience where I was so lost in a project that over 5 hours had gone by in what seemed more like 2. I actually assumed that the clock in the room had gotten screwed up somehow, so I went downstairs to find out the “real” time. The moment I realized the actual time, it occurred to me that being fully involved in a creative act – the purview of Becoming – there was a loss of identity and a time dilation. It was different from the time dilation of Witnessing, in that it was full engagement rather than full detachment. I will note here that it also appears different from the full attention to the eggroll above. In that case, though initially consciously attentive, the act is pleasure seeking (appreciating), rather than creative. In my experience, creativity has a higher flow velocity than pleasure seeking. It also requires a greater degree of effort, of intent – ongoing choosing at some level transmitted through to this present moment.

On two occasions I have awoken in the night in a state very different from any other. I experience my “self” as a tight ball of intensity, a mind over-full. It felt as if all frequencies were so compacted that their condensed state allowed for no movement at all. It was pure potential waiting for a choice. There was no “outside” of me. My normal experience of frequencies is that they are distinct from my perceptions of them and they are just passing by. I can, in a way, experience them on the outside, like wind, as they are transiting through. In this particular experience, there was “nothing” out there, as I could sense no “out there”. I was enclosed but not by anything. Though my thought process did exist, it was very slow. I remember wondering if this is what it was like at the beginning, before the Big Bang. It was empty, nearly silent but not completely so. There was no impetus to act in any way – which later made me wonder where the impulse to choose comes from. There was nothing to choose from because the compaction of energy was such that there was no movement from which to discern any boundary. There was nothing distinct to choose. Yet, I do recall choosing to fall asleep again and I remembered all of it extremely clearly when I awoke in the morning. The rate and feel of thought in this space was similar to the flow rate that I remembered – after the fact – in the creative endeavor noted above. There was active, deliberative thinking and assessing going on, but just no creative action in these two nighttime cases.

What I’m pointing out in these experiences is that it seems that when full immersion occurs – full Becoming, full appreciating or full observation – they have attributes of mind quieting and time dilation. In each case, it can only be described afterwards and there is no experience of identity for some period of time.

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.” – Jack London