Melting Manas

There's a seduction to blogging about mindfulness. It's the seduction of wisdom or profundity. Or more, it's the seduction of making the blog the point. "I'm interested in mindfulness so that I can write about it. So that I can be an expert on it. So that I can be profound, and maybe even others will recognize that." Suddenly, mindful living has gone out the window in the name of thinking about mindful living.

Thich Nhat Hanh describes in many places manas, which is one aspect of a Buddhist view of the human condition. Manas is that manifestation of our consciousness that latches onto some virtue or characteristic within us and falls in love with it. It's the way that we worship some part of our selves, almost as a defense to assure ourselves that we are enough, and here to be enough usually means to be more than everyone else. Manas turns us in on ourselves, and it cuts ourselves off from the world. It does not make us whole.

Mindfulness is a practice directed at melting away manas within us. It's a practice of quieting manas so that we can see the world to which we are tied so intimately. Or it's a way of seeing the world to which we are tied so intimately, so that we can quiet manas. And mindfulness is always about the practice. We don't quiet ourselves and open ourselves to the world for any other reason than the opening and the quieting. If we write about it or talk about it, that's nice, but it's not the point. Living mindfully, living spiritually is the point. If I write about this, it can only be because I've found something here that I want to share, that I want to describe, that I want to explore more fully myself, and I explore it by talking about it with you.