mikenz66 wrote:Hi Alan,alan... wrote:okay so can you just tell me please? all my readings seem to imply we should just be mindful and note and then drop everything that comes to mind but the satipatthana sutta says to contemplate arising/vanishing/etc., i read a commentary that says it's sequential, first the practitioner contemplates body as body, then once that's solid they contemplate arising/vanishing, then once they get it they can just do bare attention. but a lot of teachers teach to start off with bare attention.
"Just be mindful and note and then drop everything that comes to mind" is a common, and useful, instruction when beginning this sort of practice, and it could well be useful to just follow that advice for some time (months, not hours or minutes...), making sure that you really are observing, in particular, the body and feeling tone of sensations, and not just imagining it. [I'm sure I spent months with the concept of rising and falling of the abdomen and the motion of the feet, not the actual sensations... It's simple, but not easy, and it really helps to have some in-person interaction.]
However, I don't see that the totality of the instructions from any teacher I'm familiar with as being as simplistic as "just be mindful and note then drop everything that comes to mind". I gave an extensive quotation from Bhante Sujiva above about seeing how intentions arise, and there are many discussions in that book about other aspects of satipatthana.alan... wrote:basically, when are we supposed to consider things about reality and when are we supposed to just drop thoughts for non thinking mindfulness?
I think the communication problem I am having with you and PP is your equating of "knowing" with "thinking". Thinking is about concepts. For example "my leg is hurting". What we are trying to know is the basic sensations that are arising: "itching, heat, pain,...". You start to see that "leg" is a concept that you are concocting from those basic sensations. When you can see this a bit more clearly, you can discern, in the example from Bhante Sujiva, intention arising before each movement. This starts to give you some inkling of the cause-and-effect that the Suttas are talking about. Note that it is not "thinking about intention" it's "knowing intention". And it takes quite a lot of time to develop.
There are many other issues. However, I can't write a post that contains all the information in, for example, Bhante Sujiva's book, or in 10+ hours of retreat talks by Patrick Kearney:
okay mike let me just tell you what i do and we'll work backwards:
i do the bare attention thing with breath as my main object. if an emotion comes up i cannot shake or something such as physical pain i note mentally that it's not self and/or see it's causes for arising and how it will vanish, see that this is true by looking inward, and then usually this allows me to let it go.
is this correct in your understanding?