The Karma of Mindfulness.

The Karma of Mindfulness.

“Now, the Pāli word for “clinging,” upādāna, can also mean feeding. What you begin to realize as your understanding of meditation grows more subtle is that you not only feed on your present experience, using the activities of the aggregates, but you are also feeding on the activities that you do to shape that experience. In fact, that’s where your sense of your self is most centered. You feed not just on food but also on the way you feed. 

You cling to the way you feed, and you identify yourself strongly around it.

Once this point comes into focus in your meditation, you can begin to take the clinging apart. You begin to see that no matter how skillfully you shape your present experience, you’re never finished. You have to keep doing it again and again. This may not be disturbing at the beginning, especially as you’re gaining mastery over the concentration, but at some point there comes the realization that this is becoming burdensome. The work will never end. Even though your mind can gain good states of concentration, with a sense of ease, a sense of pleasure that causes no harm, it’s not good enough. You want something better than that.

This is when you turn in to look more deeply, and in particular at the act of fabrication. You see that it’s composed of acts of intention and attention—and because the mind is growing more and more quiet, you can now see very subtle acts of intention and attention. 

Your attention is always directed to what to do next, what to do next, what to do next, what to do next. Your intention at that point is to find something that goes beyond this. And there comes a point when you realize that your choices come down to very simple ones: either to stay here where you’re focused or to go focus someplace else. But you also see that either choice will involve stress.

At that moment you begin to realize that there’s another choice, which is neither here nor there, and that you don’t have to keep asking the question, what to do, what to do. 

You abandon both attention and intention, and that’s the moment when things open up in the mind. This is where the first level of awakening can occur.

One of the first things you realize when you experience the result of this letting go is that the Buddha was right. 

There really is a dimension that can be experienced that’s deathless, totally outside of space and time. 

There’s no fabrication. None of the aggregates are there, and yet there’s still an awareness—beyond the senses, even the sense of the mind. When you return from that state, you realize that there was nothing you did to create it. This is the point that’s called the end of kamma.”

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu—

The Karma of Mindfulness

—🌹🌹🌹—

19 October 2023