This Motivation For Maintaining Mindfulness Is Something Modernity Doesn’t Want You To Know

One day, you may need to embody a different kind of humanity

Most people’s lives are caught at the level of their body. Building it at the gym, refining their attractiveness, & chasing physical comfort.

They think this will make them happy — or at least prevent the deepest kinds of sadness.

Others get snared at the level of speech. Hyper-social; they’re utterly invested into their careers (typically in academia, marketing, or entrepreneurship).

Their identity revolves around communicating their place in the world.

The rarest kind of human is not someone you’ll find on social media or chatting loudly at the workplace. They see the realm of mind as most significant, cultivating it first and foremost.

Only one ever finds permanent happiness.

Tibet & ancient India were probably the only nations to develop a culture that systematically produces the third type of individual.

And there was something they took for granted, which stared them right in the face each time they peered across the vast mountain vistas & primeval forests.

The mind is a container that can take any shape.

When meditators dredged their unconscious in Tibet (by looking into their minds continuously for fourteen hours a day) there was one piece of advice offered very often.

• When seekers of awakening got caught in the un-awakened aspects of themselves, their minds shrunk. They became smaller than their problems.
• Mentors would recommend sitting atop mountains, viewing valleys from above, or gazing at vast lakes. Or simply looking at the sky!
• It is said the mental plane of a human being has no real essence; it is merely a product, an end cause. To control it, you must change the input.

What do you think will happen if you stare at a screen for more hours of the day than staring into nature? Your awareness contracts around what the mind reflects.

Whenever a meditator got caught in the talons of an emotion, memory, boredom, desire, or just sheer dread toward meditating, it was a sure sign their awareness grew smaller than needed.

Mindfulness is all about keeping something in mind. Continuously.

So the practice of meditation was primarily about remembering to keep the awareness expansive, clear, and stable.

Anytime this got hijacked by what it was focusing on, the student was instructed to self-recalibrate.

Again and again, until mental cultivation became habit:

• If awareness was getting dull, they were to re-focus and remember their inspiration.
• If distracted, they dampened and sobered their mood by reflecting on impermanence.
• And if a storm came up, wrecking everything, they were instructed to hold right to the rope of the boat — to grasp clearly the very reason they embarked on the journey.

Most of us modern people haven’t formally begun any sort of inner path. But we can ensure success when we do, by preparing our mindstreams for it now.

That’s why you should sit with your own mind, each day.

For longer & longer periods.

Not to make yourself less stressful, but to so utterly change your response to stress that it becomes impossible to get stuck in, even off the cushion in another lifetime!

Today, this ‘secret’ of your own malleability is repackaged & marketed in more ways you can imagine.

If you just commit to imbuing it into your subconscious, you won’t have to search for manifesting methods, personality trainings, or mind hacks.

You’ll have made the greatest gift you have into a personality trait to draw upon.

But something is still missing.

What happens when you encounter the so-called dark side of mindfulness — the messy eruption of the subconscious, derailing every meditator at some point?

Most people give up. They consider their minds too twisted to unravel, and promptly return to their ‘ordinary’ ways.

But those who truly see their mental plane as primary to human existence can never do so. They realize how they live in their minds creates whatever speech & bodily actions follow!

They know true beauty does not lie in temporary appearances, any more than popularity grows from contrived speech.

It flows from your very core, which must be the wellspring of motivation for all self-improvement.

Buddhists call it bodhichitta, the heart-mind of awakening:

Defined simply, it is the heart that never moves from the thought of benefitting others.

And given how complicated “others” are, it pursues higher consciousness in order to do this maximally.

Hindu traditions following the yoga sutras have a different approach. They advocate ishvara-pranidhana, total dedication & offering of oneself to reach the divine.

Both these attitudes are different sides of the same coin.

The Buddhas teach practice, rooted in devotion to everything in existence.

The Avatars implore devotion to the consciousness in & beyond everything, rooted in practice.

Regardless of which appeals to you, the practice of mindfulness can never reach fruition without it!

Ancient India’s monastic universities would often enforce 100,000 repetitions of certain chants, prayers, or prostrations, just to make sure students were secure in this intention.

Because without it, you can’t carry yourself past all the difficulties of the journey!

This is what it comes down to.

We live in a modernity in which “faith” is so demonized, it’s treated like a form of brainwashing.

To be blunt, this is nothing but a reaction against the belief & devotion-heavy path of Christianity. More than a few unfortunate events have occurred when faith wasn’t balanced with contemplative technology.

But Dharmic traditions, unlike Abrahamic religions, are nothing but the inner science of upgrading consciousness.

They are integral; dealing with the transcending of all dogmas into direct, experiential truth. And the common letter among all of them (literally) is:

ༀ

Om; the cosmic resonance; the seed of divinity in each sentient life form — which must be connected to, in order to blossom beyond all blockages.

This means that no matter how much secularization is done to Buddhism, your Buddha-nature remains sacred.

The seed of enlightenment in you, forever free and only temporarily hidden, is not something you should forget.

It’s the innate wellspring of your wisdom and compassion. The nucleus of commonality between all life. The source of your pristine knowing!

The desire to fully know & share its beatitude is the fuel; meditation and mindfulness are merely the boat and paddle!

And if you don’t paddle to the far shore, the waves might intermittently sink this perspective.