Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening

by Joseph Goldstein

Meditators can also get addicted to different meditative states, like rapture or calm. How often in our practice are we trying to recreate some experience we’ve had before? We can get addicted to investigation; we can become overly fascinated with everything we’re discovering. At one point in my practice in Burma, when I had been there for several months, the mindfulness had become very sharp, and I was seeing extremely minute details about what was arising. When I reported this to Sayadaw U Paṇḍita, thinking that things were going very well, all he said to me was, “You’re too attached to subtlety.” It was such a powerful reminder that the practice is about renunciation, about letting go; everything in our practice is in the service of that. It is best summed up in one line of the Diamond Sutra: “Develop a mind that clings to naught.” Or, rather than “clings to naught,” perhaps we should say, “doesn’t cling to anything.”