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This whole sequence presents itself to consciousness instantly.

It just jumps out of the unconscious so bright and clear and compelling that it shoves everything else out of sight.

What happens to the original sensation, the pure experience of hearing It gets lost in the shuffle, completely overwhelmed and forgotten.

We enter a world of fantasy.

Here is another example You are sitting in meditation and a sound strikes your ear.

What happens next will probably be something like this.

What was that Who did that Where did that come from How far away was that Is it dangerous And on and on you go, getting no answers but your fantasy projection.

It creeps into your experience, and it simply takes over.

When you hear a sound in meditation, pay bare attention to the experience of hearing.

What is really happening is so utterly simple that we can and do miss it altogether.

Sound waves are striking the ear in a certain unique pattern.

Those waves are being translated into electrical impulses within the brain, and those impulses present a sound pattern to consciousness.

When you hear a sound, be mindful of the process of hearing.

Everything else is just added chatter.

This same rule applies to every sensation, every emotion, every experience you may have.

Dig down through the layers of mental bric-a-brac and see what is really there.

There are times when a number of sensations may arise at once.

You might have a thought of fear, a squeezing in the stomach, an aching back, and an itch on your left earlobe, all at the same time.

Just open yourself up, and the most insistent of these phenomena will intrude itself and demand your attention.

So give it some attention just long enough to see it fade away.

If another one intrudes itself, let it in.

When it is done, return to the breathing.

This process can be carried too far, however.

Dont sit there looking for things to be mindful of.

Keep your mindfulness on the breath until something else steps in and pulls your attention away.

When you feel that happening, dont fight it.

Let your attention flow naturally over to the distraction, and keep it there until the distraction evaporates.

There will be times when you drift off, of course.

Even after long practice you find yourself suddenly waking up, realizing you have been off the track for some while.

Realize that you have been off the track for such and such a length of time and go back to the breath.

The very act of realizing that you have been off the track is an active awareness.

Mindfulness grows by the exercise of mindfulness.

It is like exercising a muscle.

Every time you work it, you pump it up just a little.

You make it a little stronger.

The very fact that you have felt that wake-up sensation means that you have just improved your mindfulness power.

However, the regret is a conditioned reflex, and it may come along anywayanother mental habit.

If you find yourself getting frustrated, feeling discouraged, or condemning yourself, just observe that with bare attention.

Give it some attention and watch it fade away, and return to the breath.

The rules we have just reviewed can and should be applied thoroughly to all of your mental states.

You are going to find this an utterly ruthless injunction.

It is the toughest job that you will ever undertake.

You will find yourself relatively willing to apply this technique to certain parts of your experience, and you will find yourself totally unwilling to use it on the other parts.

It eats away slowly at whatever you put it on.

We like the taste of certain poisons, and we stubbornly continue to eat them even while they are killing us.

Thoughts to which we are attached are poison.

You will find yourself quite eager to dig some thoughts out by the roots while you jealously guard and cherish certain others.

It is relatively easy to apply awareness to the nastier aspects of your existence.

Once you have seen fear and depression evaporate under the hot, intense beacon of awareness, you will want to repeat that process.

You want to get rid of those things because they bother you.

It is a good deal harder to apply that same process to mental states that you cherish, like patriotism, or parental protectiveness, or true love.

Positive attachments hold you in the mud just as assuredly as negative attachments.

You may rise above the mud far enough to breathe a bit more easily if you practice vipassana meditation with diligence.

And from the reports of those who have toiled their way to that lofty goal, it is well worth every effort involved.

Words are devised by the symbolic levels of the mind, and they describe those realities with which symbolic thinking deals.

It is not shackled to logic.

Nevertheless, mindfulness can be experiencedrather easilyand it can be described, as long as you keep in mind that the words are only fingers pointing at the moon.

The actual experience lies beyond the words and above the symbols.

Mindfulness could be described in completely different terms than will be used here, and each description could still be correct.

Mindfulness is a subtle process that you are using at this very moment.

The fact that this process lies above and beyond words does not make it unrealquite the reverse.

Mindfulness is the reality that gives rise to wordsthe words that follow are simply pale shadows of reality.

So it is important to understand that everything that follows here is analogy.

It is not going to make perfect sense.

It will always remain beyond verbal logic.

The meditation technique called vipassana that was introduced by the Buddha about twenty-five centuries ago is a set of mental activities specifically aimed at experiencing a state of uninterrupted mindfulness.

When you first become aware of something, there is a fleeting instant of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it.

It is that flashing split second just as you focus your eyes on the thing, just as you focus your mind on the thing, just before you objectify it, clamp down on it mentally, and segregate it from the rest of existence.

It takes place just before you start thinking about itbefore your mind says, Oh, its a dog.

That flowing, soft-focused moment of pure awareness is mindfulness.

In that brief flashing mind-moment you experience a thing as an un-thing.

You experience a softly flowing moment of pure experience that is interlocked with the rest of reality, not separate from it.

Mindfulness is very much like what you see with your peripheral vision as opposed to the hard focus of normal or central vision.

Yet this moment of soft, unfocused, awareness contains a very deep sort of knowing that is lost as soon as you focus your mind and objectify the object into a thing.

We have developed the habit of squandering our attention on all the remaining steps, focusing on the perception, cognizing the perception, labeling it, and most of all, getting involved in a long string of symbolic thought about it.

That original moment of mindfulness is rapidly passed over.

It is the purpose of vipassana meditation to train us to prolong that moment of awareness.

When this mindfulness is prolonged by using proper techniques, you find that this experience is profound and that it changes your entire view of the universe.

This state of perception has to be learned, however, and it takes regular practice.

Once you learn the technique, you will find that mindfulness has many interesting aspects.

It reflects only what is presently happening and in exactly the way it is happening.

It is that ability of the mind to observe without criticism.

With this ability, one sees things without condemnation or judgment.

One simply takes a balanced interest in things exactly as they are in their natural states.

One does not decide and does not judge.

Please note that when we say, One does not decide and does not judge, what we mean is that the meditator observes experiences very much like a scientist observing an object under a microscope without any preconceived notions, only to see the object exactly as it is.

In the same way the meditator notices impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness.

It is psychologically impossible for us to objectively observe what is going on within us if we do not at the same time accept the occurrence of our various states of mind.

In order to observe our own fear, we must accept the fact that we are afraid.

We cant examine our own depression without accepting it fully.

You cant examine something fully if you are busy rejecting its existence.

Whatever experience we may be having, mindfulness just accepts it.

No pride, no shame, nothing personal at stakewhat is there is there.

It does not get hung up in what is perceived.

Mindfulness does not get infatuated with the good mental states.

It does not try to sidestep the bad mental states.

Mindfulness treats all experiences equally, all thoughts equally, all feelings equally.

It does not get involved with thought or concepts.

It does not get hung up on ideas or opinions or memories.

Mindfulness registers experiences, but it does not compare them.