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Mindfulness, Insight, & Wisdom
The Noble Eightfold Path | Mindfulness
The ultimate truth — God, Nature, Love, Awareness, or whatever you wanna call it — is directly available, patiently waiting to be witnessed and embodied. If you want to find it, turn inward and realize it within yourself. Know directly the truth of your own experience.
This is a truth you can’t be told. It’s a truth you can’t accept on faith. And it’s a truth you can’t work out intellectually or conceptually. You can only know it directly, as an immediate and intimate kind of knowing, a bare knowing.
That brings us to today’s topic — mindfulness. If you recall, last episode we began exploring the final arena of training in the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, training in cognition, which cultivates and balances three faculties of mind: effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Last time, we covered only the first of these three, effort. Today, then, we’ll move onto mindfulness.
What is Mindfulness?
What is mindfulness? Well, let me first try to describe it succinctly so you get an idea of what I’m pointing at, and then we’ll flush it out more fully. So, mindfulness is an immediate, direct, and present knowing. One that can’t be carried into the future, remembered from the past, or written in a book. It can’t be…