This post continues the topic of how to exercise the First Great Effort, which is part of the path-factor of Skillful Effort. The first great effort is: to direct one’s effort toward preventing negative or unwholesome states of mind from arising in the first place. Thus the question we continue to try to answer is: How to prevent negative or unwholesome, i.e. unskillful, states from arising in the first place?

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, in Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness, answers thus: “By maintaining unremitting mindfulness. Just that.”

One’s ability to do this, however, is limited by how developed one’s faculty of mindfulness is, and by how habituated to its exercise the mind is. (I use ‘mind’, by the way, in a very broad sense.)

For this reason, Gunaratana’s guidance for making the first great effort centers on developing the mind’s ability and inclination for mindfulness.

Actually there is a positive feedback loop here, a mutual co-bootstrapping if you will, which flows between skillful effort and mindfulness. “Mindfulness requires training, and training requires effort.” And then mindfulness is the primary means by which to enact the first great effort.

Beginning in Mindfulness Training

Where does one begin in training in mindfulness? Morality, or the specifically ethical path-factors of skillful speech, action, and livelihood, is traditionally a beginning point for training in the Eightfold Path. It is also, as Gunaratana tells us, a beginning point in the training of skillful mindfulness specifically.

Here is a brief explanation of the ethical path-factors of speech, action, and livelihood.

Remorseful Distress

Why is ethics a beginning point in mindfulness training? Ethics is a beginning place of training in mindfulness in part because it frees one from remorse over unethical, harmful speech and deeds. Consider that distress, resulting from unethical living, impedes the mind’s ability to actuate and develop both mindful awareness and the basic stability of mind required for such awareness.

Mindfulness and Concentration

Although mindfulness and concentration are distinct, a certain amount of a certain type of concentration is required for mindfulness to be very effective. We might, following Sayadaw U Tejaniya, call this type of concentration “stability of mind.” Unethical behaviors lead to distress, particularly when one begins to become more “present” — more mindful and concentrated — and the distress interferes with the basic concentrative, mental stability which is required for, or part of, mindful awareness.

Ethics

Skillful speech, action, and livelihood, it should be noted — in other words, ethics — are not intrinsically a matter of adhering to particular mores, customs, codes, or creeds. Instead they are a matter first of not causing harm, and secondly of benefitting. Moreover these begin with and proceed from how one treats and relates to oneself.

Here are two posts which include exploration of those aspects of ethics:

Right Livelihood: Is It More Than Not Harming?

Simply Seeking Not to Screw Up: A Formal Foundation in Finance and Philosophy

Remembering

First, then, one commits to ethics, and attempts to embody and develop those skillful qualities. Second, one makes the effort to actuate whatever capacity for mindfulness one already possesses. Gunaratana instructs that one aspect of mindfulness (it has many aspects and functions) is “remembering.” In this case it is remembering to apply whatever capacity for mindfulness we may have: “Again and again, you remember to reapply the mind to the present moment. You bring together more and more moments in which you are successfully mindful.”

Continuity and Intention

Gunaratana is describing continual mindfulness. Another excellent teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, has further added to my understanding of continual mindfulness. As I now understand it, those moments when our awareness is not mindful are not, necessarily, fully breaks in the continuity of mindfulness. Mindfulness is not only functioning in the moments where our awareness is actually mindful. If the intention to exercise mindfulness is present, even when the mind is not actually mindful, then those moments too belong to a continuity of mindfulness.

Granted, such continuity is less developed and more imperfect. Even so, the intention of mindfulness, even when not actuated in mindful awareness at the moment, is what enables and causes one to remember to become mindful. It is mindfulness that “remembers” to exercise or actuate itself after becoming “forgotten.” The remembering is powered by the persistent intention. Thus it is as important to commit to, to recommit to, and to cultivate the intention and inclination to mindfulness, as it is to remember and to actuate and to maintain skillfully mindful awareness.

That will need to be it for the present post. I’ll continue with the topic in future.

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SeekerFive creates expressive photographic artwork: a few selections on Etsy at elementalexpressive.etsy.com.

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SeekerFive is gradually collecting and developing resources to aid in philosophical practice and study at philosophicadvising.com.