Mindfulness or Mindlessness

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I wanted to talk about what the fathers mean in Hesychasm when they want us to turn off the mind, and how that relates to Buddhism because someone made a comment that they are uncomfortable with the teaching because it sounds like Buddhism.

What you will find in Buddhism and in Hesychasm is that the mind works like an out-of-control mining drill, imagine you’re trying to get gold out of a cave wall and you're using this drill and it just keeps going when all the gold is gone, next its off for the copper, and then just for stone. That’s how the mind works. It keeps trying to find meaning, propose, control, and it does this for the purpose of pleasure and the fathers of Hesychasm and in Buddhism make the point that the mind doesn’t know when to stop mining.

The greatest example of this and that most people can relate to is to go be alone in a quiet place. The first thing your mind will do is to make you aware that it doesn’t like this so it will start daydreaming planning, or doing other things to get you out of the quiet place. The mind is even worse when it comes to prayer. It wants to take charge of the experience. It will start leading you to different images of holy ideas about God that make you feel good. It will even deceive us into believing that something is of God when it’s not because it makes us feel good.

The fathers in hesychasm will tell you that you need to turn off the drill if you really want to have an experience of God. God is in hidden that silence that we are trying to get away from and when you learn to turn off the drill that is when the encounter with God begins in prayer and the father teaches us to do that by being watchful, mindfulness as my Buddhist brothers and sisters call it. You will find the fathers in Hesychasm using different teachings on how to be watchful, same could be true for Buddhists in their teachings on mindfulness, and the greatest is how they use the Jesus prayer.  When you are praying the prayer they teach you to focus on the words and nothing else, no images, no ideas, no trying to get something out, no spiritual feelings. They teach you to let the prayer do the work for you. To trust Jesus that he is doing the work.

In doing these things you are basically trusting him with the drill. In doing so your mind will enter a state of Hesychia, stillness, and eventually as you do this, you won't even need the methods that the fathers teach you, you will be able to sit down and be still and with your will still oriented toward Jesus Christ, still letting him do the work even though you don’t see it. The evidence is in the fact that you will find peace, you will find joy, and you will find that your mind will seek him when you turn the drill back on. You will be able to have a mind that’s not out of control. A mind that works properly.

Now I want to come back to how this relates to Buddhism and in I doing that I want to quote the apostle Paul, he said, in speaking about God: that in him, we move, we breathe and have our being.  He was making a statement that God is here and God is everywhere and that by nature we can experience God in this world and it doesn’t matter what religion we are in and I can prove that was his meaning because he is quoting a Greek religious text that was talking about Zues. Now, was he promoting Hellenism the worship of Greek Gods in doing that? No, he was promoting a universal truth. Anyone can find God because God is here. The natural world was made for us to encounter God in and there is nothing more natural than our bodies.  Just because you don’t understand or get it all right, wont change the fact. Just because we live in a fallen world doesn’t change this fact.

If we are doing something good and true God will be there. This is why I believe in the Buddhist understanding of mindfulness because it is my teaching too. It’s hesychasm. Now where I will differ from a Buddhist, just as the apostle would differ from the Greek he quoted, is in the orientation to truth. In Buddhism ,it’s pretty universal that they don’t believe in personhood in their experience of mindfulness. I will be honest with my Buddhist brothers and sisters, there is a person in their silence that we are both experiencing. It’s there even if you don’t acknowledge  it.  That is why I believe hesychasm picks up where Buddhists leave off. We continue to encounter that person so that we can become the persons that we were meant to be.