What is Authentic Mindfulness?
Can the modern society we live in profit from the knowledge of generations of Buddhist monks, teachers and yogis who have dedicated their lives to meditation and the exploration of their own minds? Can meditation really change the quality of our lives and our relationship to everyday life? If it can, how does it do?
This intriguing dialogue between West and East on the subject of meditation is in full swing today. After being treated as an exotic skill inherent in Far Eastern religions for decades, meditation is nowadays explored and practiced in a wide variety of settings – the world’s leading universities, schools and rehabilitation centers, corporate “mindful observing” courses for the employees are often organized, even the U.S. military introduced an experimental meditation course within one of its elite units – the Marines.
The effects of meditation have now been confirmed by medical research, and it has been proven that after a few months of practice, those parts of the brain that are responsible for the feelings of fear, anxiety and stress are calmed down in general, while on the other hand, cognitive abilities are revitalized, memory and and emotional balance enhanced, and empathy and compassion awakened.
An experiential “encounter” with one’s own mind
results in the abolition of a stressful lifestyle and the realization of a new quality of peace, concentration, joy and creativity, whether in private life or in business environment.
Given the growing interest in this area in our country as well, the founder and longtime leader of the Buddhist Shechen Society, Mihajlo Pažanin, designed and launched a unique study of meditation – the Authentic Mindfulness Studies. These studies bring basic knowledge and methods in a modern and accessible way that enable us to know and train our minds through immediate experience. It is designed to be accessible to everyone, and it provides detailed explanations and tools that, used step by step, can completely change the relationship to ourself, the environment and the people in it.
Mindfulness
Originally, what we now know in the world as “mindfulness” originally comes from the teachings Buddha presented within his Fourth Noble Truth, that is, the Eightfold Path that leads to liberation from suffering and ignorance. The seventh point of the mentioned path in Sanskrit is called samyak smrti, and refers to the ability to impartially observe the phenomena of mind and body through mental attention.
In English, the most common word used to translate this term is “mindfulness”, but in Croatian and many other languages, the term says absolutely nothing about what it describes. Someone would ask: Why not use the word “attention” to translate the mentioned word? Because in Buddhist phenomenology (Abhidharma) very precise expressions are used for the individual functions of the mind, and thus the initial mental attention (skt. Mano sikara) is described as an elementary current level of presence that accompanies any cognitive act.
When we turn mental attention into a deliberate act
of prolonged neutral observation of a particular phenomenon, it turns into what the Sanskrit word smrti describes, a function of mind that is described by the word minfulness. Hence the name “Authentic Mindfulness Studies ” – because it is a system that in a modern way, free from the cultural and religious norms of the Far East, step by step, leads to the introduction, exploration and deep transformation of one’s mind.
Therefore, this approach differs from many similar courses that teach mindfulness primarily as an effective antistress self-help method; although it undoubtedly delivers such results, original mindfulness aims at a much more ambitious goal: how to free the mind of the barriers we call “ignorance that brings suffering” once and for all.
“We try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory. In its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality”