For many years I practiced mindfulness meditation as a Buddhist monk. For hours each day I paid careful attention to the coming and going of my breath and to the sensations of my body as I meditated. I became adept at noticing thoughts and feelings as they occurred and found myself feeling calmer, more spacious, and more disengaged from the drama that had seemed to be my life. In time my customary anxiety diminished, and a sense of ease and contentment enveloped me. My relationships improved, my mind settled down, and my concentration deepened. Instead of worrying about the future or obsessing about the past, I lived increasingly in the moment, focused on doing the next task as carefully and mindfully as possible. From a nervous intellectual, I transformed into a paragon of patience, groundedness, and equanimity. I was a completely different person.
At a certain point, however, after years of mindfully following my breath, studying the subtleties of meditation with some excellent teachers, and teaching mindfulness myself, I reached what I felt were the limits of mindfulness. I had certainly become calmer and less reactive, but I also found myself feeling more disengaged from life, as if I were experiencing it at a distance, rather than being immersed in the immediacy of the moment. My meditations were definitely more focused and free of mind chatter, but they seemed somehow dry and lacking in aliveness and energy. When I described my experience to my Zen teacher, he merely told me to meditate more. After considerable soul-searching, I decided to set aside my Buddhist robes and meditation cushion and study Western psychology. I knew there were other ways of working with the mind and heart, and I wanted to learn what they had to offer.
Several years later, after dabbling in other forms of Buddhist meditation, I was introduced by a friend to a teacher of nondual wisdom from outside the Buddhist tradition who advised me to stop practicing mindfulness and directly inquire into the nature of reality. I was intrigued by his words, and by the deep silence I experienced in his presence, and I set about following his guidance. One day, while I was driving on the freeway, a phrase he had often repeated, “the seeker is the sought,” drifted through my awareness. Suddenly my reality turned inside out. Instead of being identified with the little me inside my head, I realized that I was the limitless, unconditional, ever-awake awareness in which the thoughts and feelings I had mistakenly taken myself to be were arising and passing away. Even though I was no longer meditating, I had stumbled upon the experience I had been seeking for so many years through meditation. Had my years of practice informed this moment of fruition? I have no doubt. But meditation alone turned out to be insufficient to reveal the secret I was struggling to unveil.
This book echoes my own journey of seeking and finding, and it draws on my many years of guiding others in discovering what cannot really be taught, only evoked and realized. Although I found mindfulness extremely helpful for living in the present moment and easing my turbulent mind and heart, I ultimately had to go beyond it to discover the peace, love, and happiness I was seeking. The title is meant to be provocative but in no way to diminish the exceptional benefits that mindfulness confers. For beginners to meditation, I still recommend cultivating a mindfulness meditation practice as the most effective way to work with stress, anxiety, depression, grief, anger, and other challenging emotions and mind-states, gain insight into the causes of suffering, and achieve relative peace and equanimity. But for a variety of reasons that I discuss at length in this book, lasting fulfillment may elude you unless you go beyond mindfulness and come to rest in what I call awakened awareness.
Many of the best-known teachers of mindfulness in the West appreciate this perspective. Influenced by nondual teachers and teachings from the Buddhist and other traditions, they caution against practicing mindfulness instrumentally—that is, simply as a method to achieve some more desirable future state.
Instead, they point to a noninstrumental perspective where mindfulness opens you to a dimension of inner wisdom you already possess but merely need to access. Some even use the term “mindfulness” as a synonym for awareness itself. They teach that the practice of mindfulness ultimately takes you beyond mindfulness in the conventional sense to the realization of awakened awareness. For the most part, however, these teachers don’t offer a critique of mindfulness. And they don’t provide the more direct approach that I describe in this book.
I’ve structured this book to mirror the retreats I lead: Each chapter features teachings, guided meditations, and dialogue. The teachings use words to point beyond words to our natural state of awakened awareness. The meditations, which are interspersed throughout the chapter, invite you to step beyond your conditioned mind to experience a direct glimpse of awakened awareness for yourself. And the question-and-answer sections, which are set apart at the end of each chapter, address topics that need further elaboration. If you want to get the maximum benefit from your time in these pages, I suggest that you resist your habitual tendency to accumulate new beliefs and concepts and instead let the words bypass your conceptual mind as you allow genuine insight to blossom. Immerse yourself in the teachings, stop from time to time to practice the meditations, and turn to the dialogues to get answers to some of the questions that come up as you read. May the truth described in these pages come alive for you, and may the book guide you on the direct path home to the peace and happiness of awakened awareness.
For the purposes of this book, I’ve chosen to critique the progressive form of mindfulness that’s widely practiced these days in secular settings and many retreat centers worldwide, and then to contrast it with the direct approach described in these pages. But for some teachers, the deliberate practice of mindfulness is a natural stepping stone to a more spontaneous, effortless, and self-sustaining level of awareness that’s essentially identical with what I present in this book. Ultimately, mindfulness itself, when practiced under the guidance of a teacher who knows the direct path home, can take you beyond mindfulness to your natural state of awakened awareness.