ABOUT MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS

How many kinds of meditation are there?

Well… hundreds, perhaps thousands?  Or you could look at it another way – there are two sorts. One is still-mind meditation, and the other is mind-oriented meditation, of which there are thousands of varieties of practice. But they all involve the notion of getting something for the mind/ego/person/self, while still-mind meditation gets to know the mind/eg0/person/self objectively and the practitioner becomes free of ego-driven attitudes towards life.  Big difference.

How many kinds of mindfulness are there? Really, only one – the capacity to notice the mind rather than being caught up in the ups and downs of the mind. But this is sometimes mistaken for a way to reach goals, in which case something has disappeared from what mindfulness is.

Also, there are many other names for “mindfulness”. Amongst them are awareness; the seer; witness consciousness; observation and probably any other that gives the sense that a quiet noticing consciousness does not participate in the thinking of the mind.

I might call it Consciousness Without Cognition.