I have been promising to talk about The Third Foundation of Mindfulness for some weeks now. So today is the day.
Review: To review for those who are newer to this thread of teaching I have been presenting here, one of the seminal teachings of the Buddha’s path is the Satipatthana Sutta, known to us more familiarly as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness or Four Abodes of Mindfulness. We have been talking about and practicing with these teachings from the very outset of these pages. This will also be familiar to those of you who engaged in the 8-week course Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction a few years ago. The Four Foundations of Mindfulness are the basis for the Insight tradition of mindfulness and the bedrock of our practice.
The First Foundation is Mindfulness of the Body. Breath awareness is the foundation practice from this teaching. Body scans, while a newer iteration, are another valuable aspect of Mindfulness of the Body. The Second Foundation of Mindfulness is Mindfulness of Feelings. Feelings in this Buddhist context refers to the initial feeling tone or valence of positive, negative, or neutral that arises in the first nano second of an experience to let us know whether this experience is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This is a very useful aspect of experience which can save us from burning our hands on a hot stove, stepping in front of an oncoming bus, catching Covid from an infected friend. It can also bind us together with love and protective compassion to a tiny baby, a stray kitten, a faltering parent. It can swell our hearts when we hear a bird call in spring or witness the first blooms of daffodils or irises we planted last fall. It allows us to continue our day without interruption when the sound of the heat goes on and off, when a car drives by, when we brush by furniture or touch a plate.
The Third Foundation of Mindfulness: Mindfulness of Feelings leads us directly into Mindfulness of Mind - the Third Foundation, because directly behind those initial tones of feeling toward pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral is the arising of thoughts, perceptions, opinions, mind states, memories, fantasies - either in an avalanche of mental events that can commandeer our minds and energies for long periods of time.
Imagine an incident when someone borrowed something from you and promptly lost it, or conversely, what happens when you wander through a clothing store, a hardware store, a stationery store.
In this imagining, you might remember a whole cascade of negative thoughts and emotions that arise from the incident with the borrower or the deluge of wanting, imagining, fantasizing that accompanied you down each aisle of the stores of abundance. This cascade and the ongoing mind stream of thoughts and emotions is the province of the mind - and investigating this stream is Mindfulness of Mind.
We’ve touched on this territory often. Mindfulness invites us to bring our nonjudgmental awareness in the present moment to our experience of our minds. What are our thoughts? In this moment? Our emotions? Our moods and mind states? Are we remembering something? Fantasizing about something? Planning a future event or activity? How would we describe our mind? Bright and alert? Sleepy or foggy? Depressed? Busy? Constricted?
The teaching of Mindfulness of Mind in the Satipatthana Sutta, instructs us to discern what is underneath the activity of our minds, what qualities are present at the root of the mental event we are encountering, what qualities are absent, and whether those qualities are wholesome or unwholesome. Is greed at the basis of the thought about buying a new sports car? Is aversion prompting the grumbling about an irritating neighbor?
There are eight qualities whose presence or absence are the concern of the Buddha’s mindfulness of mind. Lust (which here refers to greed or wanting), hatred or aversion, delusion, and distraction are unwholesome states of mind. The higher states of mind are great, unsurpassable, concentration, and liberation and refer to wholesome and more advanced meditative states. Liberation is enlightenment and pretty advanced and wholesome. We can have moments of these states but we’ll leave that for another time.
Back to the reality of greed or the wanting mind, hatred or aversion, delusion, or distraction. According to Donald Rothberg in a dharma talk given at Spirit Rock in 2012 (see Dharmaseed.org), the characteristic that is common to these unwholesome states is concern for the self alone. "I” want this. “I” don’t want that. These are not altruistic states. The other quality that accompanies these states is a lack of concern for consequences. “I’ll” have that no matter what. “I’m” going to ignore this intense pain in my leg and keep running.
Seeing a new bloom in your garden and wanting to share it with a friend is not greed at work. Receiving a gift of dark chocolate and hiding it from company is.
I’ll end with an illustration of the astonishing power of mindfulness. In Satipatthāna: The Direct Path to Realization, esteemed meditation teacher, author and scholar, Analayo writes, “Maintaining non-reactive awareness...counters the impulse towards either reaction or suppression contained in unwholesome states of mind, and thereby deactivates their emotional and attentional pull.”
He footnotes the observation with a citation from a book by John Newman who writes, “…The proper approach for overcoming mental defilements is repeated wise observation. A clinical case supporting the ingenuity of the approach is documented by Deatherage 1975, p. 40, where a twenty-three-year-old male, hospitalized for extreme periodic aggressiveness and alcohol abuse, was cured within eight weeks simply by being taught to recognize and mentally name the emotions he experienced, without even knowing that what he was doing was related to “meditation”. Another chronic anger case-study involving awareness of mind as cure can be found in Woolfolk 1984. p. 551.”
I have listed the book titles below for those interested.