I am not familiar with the Buddhist concept of mindfulness and so I was not surprised that I did not gave fair treatment of the term in my last blog before this meeting.
Was hoping that someone will enlighten me about mindfulness and I was really glad that Sandra came to the meeting and filled in some of the missing concepts.
My take from Sandra's explanation is that mindfulness in Buddhism involve letting go of judgment of the situation, accepting what is happening, detach oneself so that one can see what is happening without the bias and coloring from our previous experiences and preconceptions.
When we reached emptiness while being aware of our thoughts drifting by, we do not own it, judge it, name it (judging is involved in naming) or try to explain it, we may then be able to see what we were not able to see before.
Another way of looking at this is that we put so much of routine and familiar occurrences in our subconscious that we are not aware of it judging and contextualizing what we are observing.
Eye witness to car accidents are known to fill in details they did not see with their "mind's eye".
I am still not sure I have grasped the full concept of mindfulness yet but at least I feel I am making progress.
We also discussed how our minds seems to be moving from thought to thought in a serial fashion triggered by the last thought or observation. We cannot assume that we will always move back to evaluate whether what we are about to do is part of an overall optimized solution.
Richard pointed out the significance of naming and word usage. The act of naming something seems to make it more understandable and acceptable even though no further knowledge have been gained.
The choice of a word out of a number of similar words with slightly different shade of meaning automatically place judgement on the situation being described.
It was great to get into discussing ideas again after the summer break. Thanks to all the participants for a lively exchange!
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