how do you talk about mindfulness?

[Gem]

Mindfulness is good because it's the truth of this experience 'as it is', and it isn't 'an experience' of any specific sort.

[Unseeking Seeker]

Noticing the ebb and flow of all external and internal movement held in the womb of ever present silence, is what I would term as mindfulness or we may say attentiveness or simply awake awareness.

[Maisy]

Originally Posted by sky

“The past no longer is.."

The Buddha.

The idea of "mindfulness" is the past. If you are here now as "awareness itself free of past" even mindfulness ceases to exist. There is just the now with no mental interpretation or interference. Quiet, empty seeing, being. But in that can be everything, talking, interreacting, creating, being busy, it's the consciousness that has changed, nothing else. The "one" doing it all. The one that experiences. The experiencer has no agenda or desire for anything. It is not conditioned in any way.

Buddha is the past. Buddhism is the past. If “The past no longer is.." one is free from all of it. One truly is responsible alone for their own experience of now.

Paraphrasing this idea online about Buddha's raft metaphor: The Buddha does not transfer his teachings to the dharma, to our lives, like the sensible use of a raft is to cross a river, not to carry it on your back while going overland, the proper use of the teachings is to liberate yourself, once liberated one has no use for them. One "is" them. They are realized. Lived. Teachings pointing to realities are not restricted to one teacher or religion. They are themselves truths or realities that exist in us, in everyone, regardless to what they have been exposed to externally. Anyone can find them for themselves, though teachers can help one find them.

[sky]

Originally Posted by FallingLeaves

and honestly im tired of listening when I'm told that...

Use 'ear plugs'

[sky]

There is neither past nor future, there is only the present. Yesterday was the present when we experienced it, tomorrow will be the present when we experience it. Experience can only takes place in the present, and beyond experience nothing exists.

[FallingLeaves]

yeah but you might realize that in the present moment we can have all sorts of fun 'remembering' some past or 'envisioning' some future.

To me it seems that it isn't that we are living in the past or future, just we get ourselves lost in maybe a less than desirable rendition of the present which we then describe with words like 'past' and 'future' and assume somehow we don't have a present because we are obsessed with thinking about those other things?

But in reality the present is all we have, and all we ever had, we never deviated from it other than to decorate it in less than desirable ways and then assume we are somehow locked into continuing the way we have always gone about things before... (well and sometimes to sleep lol)

So I personally think that if I am going to be serious about this mindfulness stuff I can't even claim that those two things are bad and try to rid myself of them, without veering away from that which I seek...

this trap we are in is insidious.

[FallingLeaves]

Originally Posted by sky

Use 'ear plugs'

believe it or not when I finally got the bright idea of insulating myself from the meanness of life by using earplugs, my guides vehemently said 'no' to that one.

oh well, another day another dollar....

[sky]

Originally Posted by FallingLeaves

oh well, another day another dollar....

I thought they'd finished the Panama Canal

[sky]

Originally Posted by FallingLeaves

yeah but you might realize that in the present moment we can have all sorts of fun 'remembering' some past or 'envisioning' some future.

Definitely, memories and imagination can be fun

[Maisy]

Originally Posted by FallingLeaves

this trap we are in is insidious.

One way I see it is anything we think, like "this trap we are in is insidious" only has a reality in the mental world. But in the actual world, or physical world as it is without any mental ideas, I think a thought is kind of meaningless. It only has a meaning to one looking at the now or the "what is" through the mental world or a thought based interpretation. If that makes any sense.

I think also the "thing" may exist and may be experienced without any words about it being present. But then something like an "insidious trap" may be fictional or not. I would have to witness or experience it in some real way in the now for it to be actual and not just imagined. I know what an apple is and know they exist, but is one physically present that I can see, touch, taste, and smell? In not, I am dealing with a mental apple, a conceptual apple. While we can experience the world though a conceptual filter we don't have to. We can instead experience the world as it is without the conceptual.