Mindfulness

People-watching is a fascinating pastime. Living and working in the city gives you plentiful opportunity to gaze, admire and be perplexed. 

It gives me delight to see the pretty faces of women – on a tram in the morning or coming out of the underground train station as I pass by, or in back lane cafes at lunchtime. 

One day recently it struck me there was a little more to this people watching than I had supposed. Over many years of admiring women, it occurred to me that I was really only looking at one face. It was the ideal of beauty underneath the multitude of variations, the form of the rose beyond the variety of colour, shape and smell. In the language of depth psychology, I was looking at the archetypal Goddess, or a reflection of my own anima. 

It reminded me of something Joseph Campbell wrote in his book, Myths to Live By. In describing the way humans see life, he uses the image of a ceiling with many light bulbs pouring forth light. One could choose, as is typical for most of us most of the time, to focus on the individual bulbs. Or, one could see and appreciate the animating light that all have in common, that makes all the vessels essentially one.

In modern Western society we tend to see ourselves, each other and the world as discreet and largely disconnected forms. Seeing the shared Life signifies spiritual awakening, a calling to deeper and more fulfilling experience, to what is truly important in life. Despite the way we think and act most of the time, sometimes people demonstrate the underlying non-dual reality. I think of those who risk their lives heroically to save others – there’s an implicit recognition that all life is one.

Such recognition could be called “mindfulness” or “looking with eyes that see”. It leads to a kind of pattern thinking. Tending a garden, we acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of plants, soil, water and micro-organisms, but we also connect with the pulsating Life that all the elements share, that is the core. We are drawn to the archetypal experience and meaning of Garden. Cooking dinner, we prepare various items of food through a number of methods, but we are also engaged in Creation and the food is a sacrament to the continuation of Life. It is an act of joy and love.

Religious ritual has through human history been the means by which consciousness is elevated. Yet in the West organised religion has been dying a slow death, its vitality lost behind dogma and the glorification of particular deities and saviours. Nowadays it is up to the individual, linking with fellow travellers, to find their own way along the spiritual path.

How do you cultivate mindfulness? I think the first step is validation of non-dual reality. Existence is not a random and meaningless set of acts – everything is alive with meaning, though the meaning might often escape us. Such things as dreams, coincidences and the imagination must be taken seriously and given their rightful and honoured place in our lives and in the world at large. The metaphoric and poetic has to be restored in value equal to the rational and scientific. I think meditation is also important here – the act and ability to be aware of ourselves fully in the present moment. Out of the silence we enter in meditation, those parts of our personality hidden behind our everyday persona emerge. We also become aware of the infinite that lies beyond the personality. The more conscious we become of the patterns underneath surface reality, the richer, ultimately, our lives become.