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Mindfulness Is Not a Part-Time Job: Dementia, Flowers, and Attention

 

ISSAN DORSEY

I was talking with a friend recently about the phrase “coming to reside in your breath-mind,” and working with the phrase, and how useful it has been to me. I thought it was interesting that I’d never really heard it before and was just now beginning to work with it.

We have to be willing to explore and experiment in our practice. To do this, we have to have a sense of humor and a willingness to explore and experiment with our lives and our uncomfortableness. For instance, we know that sometimes we can sit for a few minutes, or even a few days, and at some point it gets pretty uncomfortable.

Lately I have been exploring this way of thinking with a friend who has AIDS dementia; the virus is living in his brain. I’m thinking and working on it and talking with him about it because the virus that is attacking so many of us now ends up being in the brain. So is there some way for us, who aren’t sick, to experience that with him? I don’t know yet. My question is this: How can we be with people who have dementia? And how can we experience the dementia — delusion — that we all have anyway? Mind is always creating confusion, joy, depression, “like,” and “don’t like.” But there is also a “background mind.” This background mind is what my friend and I have been discussing.

Sometimes when I’m talking about uncomfortableness, I talk about the five fears — fear of dying, fear of illness, fear of dementia, fear of loss of livelihood, and fear of public speaking. Especially the third one: the fear of unusual states of mind. How can we come to have appreciation and respect for this fear and not just resistance, so that we can enter our fear, allowing these new areas of uncomfortableness? When we can enter each of these new spaces, we can begin to look at truthfulness.

Why do we have to sit? Really, if we’re completely sincere, then there’s no reason to sit. I’m not completely sincere, so I have to keep sitting to check on myself. Even if we’re involved with unskillful actions, the one quality we should strive for is truthfulness. Truthfulness takes a total commitment to see all aspects of ourselves and our unskillfulness. Then, if we can embrace the totality of ourselves, we can embrace the totality of others and of the world. Even when we see a beautiful flower, we say, “Oh what a beautiful flower.” “Beautiful flower” is extra. Just look at the flower.

Suzuki Roshi wrote, “When we practice zazen, our mind is calm and quite simple. But usually our mind is very busy and complicated, and it is difficult to be concentrating on what we are doing.” This is because when we act, we think, and this thinking leaves some trace. Our activity is shadowed by some preconceived idea. The traces and notions make our mind very complicated. When we do something with a simple, clear mind, we have no shadows and our activity is strong and straightforward.

Even zazen practice gets so complicated. We’re dissecting every aspect of what’s going on, reviewing and comparing. How do we keep it simple and straightforward? How do we come to know this basic truth of practice and Buddhism? The teaching and the rules can and should change according to the situation and the people we’re practicing with, but the secret of practice cannot be changed. It’s always truth.

We teach ourselves and encourage ourselves by creating this space, the meditation hall, so we can begin looking at our minds. “Don’t invite your thoughts to tea” is an expression of Suzuki Roshi’s that I’ve always found useful. Now I’m saying, “Create background mind.”

This practice is simple: watch your breaths and don’t invite your thoughts to tea. But not inviting your thoughts to tea doesn’t mean to get rid of thinking. That is discrimination. So there’s no reason to get rid of thoughts, but rather to have a blank, noninterfering relationship with them. Don’t make your mind blank, but rather have some blank relationship with the thoughts. Begin to see the space behind and around the thoughts. Shift the seat of your identity out of your thoughts and come to reside in your breath-mind. We develop our intention to reside in our breath-mind by first bringing our intention to “breath as mind,” and then by shifting the seat of our identity from our thoughts to our breath.

This all ties in with how we use the meditation hall, this laboratory. We should have a willingness to explore with our lives, and this is our laboratory right here — how we use the meditation hall and how we use what happens outside of it. Mindfulness is not a part-time job.