Living the Mindful Life

I happen to like everyday life very much. I really have no desire to live in a monastery, and so I find being more present and mindful in everyday life extremely valuable for the style of life I live. I am also, like everybody else, lost in my thoughts a good deal of the time or carried away by my emotions or a little crazy, but I have found that the kind of meditation practice that comes primarily from the Gurdjieff tradition -- I bring a lot of modern psychology in, too -- can be very helpful to escape at least partially from that tyranny of overactive thought and feeling that makes us lose contact with reality.

Remember when good news / bad news jokes were popular? I'll start by giving you the good news.

The good news is that because our deeper nature is really wonderful, there is hope! We can become less crazy. We can have more vividness and realness in our lives and can get in better and better contact with our deeper nature. Part of the good news is that there are a lot of techniques for doing that, although they often require social support. They are hard to do solely on our own.

The bad news comes in two major formats. One is that we have been programmed and conditioned to have a miserable view of ourselves and life, a programming that gets us into trouble all the time. The second part of the bad news is that not only were we programmed once but the program has become automatic, runs all the time, and is constantly reinforced by the mindlessness of our society. We do not need the slightest bit of mindfulness to get through everyday life; we can run totally on automatic.

Gurdjieff, who had a very no-nonsense, don't-bother-me-with-bullshit approach to things, put it very simply: most of the people you see on the street are dead. They are walking and talking, they have carrers, they can get elected into high political office, but they are dead. Their real inner essence, their soul, their spirit, whatever you want to call it, has become so buried under the mass of automatic programming that, for all practical purposes, they are machines, and there is no hope for them.

I do not like statements about there being no hope for somebody -- they are contrary to my hopes and temperament -- but practically, a lot of people are very deeply immersed in their own conditioning, and there is not much chance they will do anything about it. They will live and die as programmed automatons. And we are all like automatons to far too high a degree.

Gurdjieff said, "Man is asleep". He said that over and over and over again and then elaborated it in a way that I actually think is a more accurate metaphor: we are walking around in a waking dream, a dangerous dream. The dreams we have at night are quite safe, actually, because we just lie there in bed. We do not do anything in the physical world that could get us into trouble. The dreams we have while we are awake, however, get us into a lot of trouble, because we are not in clear, accurate touch with what is going on around us, yet we act, and we reap the consequences of our actions......

I have said that Gurdjieff's path is primarily a matter of mindfulness in everyday life. He taught, to the best of my knowledge, almost nothing in the way of formal, sitting meditation practices as we would normally categorize them -- although these were introduced to some extent by some of his students later. His theory was that the place in which you create all your troubles is ordinary life, and so that is both the place you need mindfulness the most and the best possible place to learn it.

I personally find Gurdjieff's techniques for creating mindfulness in daily life much more practical and successful than Buddhist ones. In my (hopefully, too limited) acquaintance with several Buddhist systems, they always stress that you should be mindful in ordinary life, not just in meditation, but in practice, almost all the emphasis is on formal meditation, and there are few, if any, practical techniques given for bringing this mindfulness to everyday life.

Gurdjieff said one of the best ways to become mindful in everyday life is to use your body. For instance, feel the sensations in your right hand now. Are they in the future?

(Reader, try this.)

No, they are now. 

Where are they?

(Reader, try this.)

They are here. 

Buddhists do talk about how being incarnated in a human body is actually the best of all the six realms of existence for practicing enlightenment. We have tremendous advantages here. One of the advantages is that we have these physical bodies that are anchored in the here and now. Our bodily sensations and sensory perceptions exist in a specific place and time, the present moment and place, so we can use them to stabilize our minds. Gurdjieff's technique for creating mindfulness in everyday life is to deliberately split your attention, so that a small part of your attention is always monitoring what is happening in your physical body. This deliberate split of attention acts like an anchor in the here and now, so that you are not swept away into thoughts, emotions, fantasies, reactions to thoughts and fantasies, reactions to reactions, and on and on that are evoked by both external events and previous thoughts, feelings and fantasies.....

The ideal way to become more mindful is simply to make the effort to be more mindful at all times. Indeed, this is what we must practice. Since we are, unfortunately, a long way from being able to do that very well, a good way would be to have an enlightened, perceptive teacher with you at all times, someone who notices when you have slid back into the fantasy that passes for ordinary consciousness and who reminds you at that point -- Wake Up! This would be especially helpful at moments when observing your mechanicalness would yield great insights. It is hard, though, to come across enlightened teachers, especially those who can follow you around through your day-to-day activities, where you most need this mindfulness. So that is not a very practical method. We have to do this work on our own, but we can use techniques to help remind us.



From ~ Living The Mindful Life: A Hanbook For Living In The Present Moment
By Charles T. Tart, P.h.D.







Related Links:

+ Sensing Exercises
+ Attention Exercises
+ Additional Gurdjieff Exercises