Beneath the Dust – Revealing the Awake Consciousness

📖 What’s This Paper About?

This paper explores the concept of awake consciousness in Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness practice. Written by Mati Lieblich, it’s a chapter from the book “Paths of Mindfulness: Everyday Practice Spaces” that examines how we can cultivate seven facets of awakened mind: mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquility, concentration, and mental stability in our daily lives.

Why This Matters

In our busy modern lives, we often experience mental states that cloud our awareness and create suffering beyond our unavoidable physical pain. The Buddhist approach to mindfulness offers practical ways to recognize these mental patterns and transform them into qualities that support well-being and clarity.

• Western mindfulness focuses on reducing psychological distress, while Buddhist practice aims for a fundamental transformation of consciousness
• Understanding the “painful guests” in our mind (craving, aversion, restlessness, dullness, doubt) is the first step toward freedom
• The seven awakening factors provide a comprehensive map for developing a clear, stable mind regardless of external conditions

Top 5 Takeaways

2. Mindfulness is the Foundation

Mindfulness is the first and foundational quality of awakened consciousness, acting as a stabilizing and balancing factor in our experience. Like a skilled seasoning that improves any dish, adding mindfulness to any mental state begins a process of transformation, allowing us to recognize what’s happening without being completely identified with it.

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The Bigger Picture

The Buddha’s teachings on awakened consciousness offer a comprehensive approach to human suffering that remains remarkably relevant today. While Western mindfulness has emphasized stress reduction and psychological well-being, this text reminds us of the deeper transformative potential in these practices. By working skillfully with our attention and mental habits, we can develop a mind that remains clear, compassionate, and stable regardless of external circumstances—creating a foundation for meaningful engagement with life’s inevitable challenges.

Final Thought

The path to awakened consciousness isn’t about escaping the world but developing the capacity to be fully present with it—learning to recognize our mental patterns, work with them skillfully, and gradually transform painful states into clarity, vitality and equanimity.

Beneath the Dust – Revealing the Awake Consciousness

This chapter explores the seven factors of awake consciousness – mindfulness, investigation, vitality, joy, tranquility, concentration, and mental stability – and how we can integrate them into our everyday lives. Based on Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness practice, it explains how to recognize mental states that create suffering and transform them into qualities that support clarity and well-being. Through practical exercises and explanations, the author offers guidance on cultivating these qualities both in formal meditation and daily activities.

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Keywords: mindfulness, awake consciousness, Buddhist philosophy, mental states, meditation, daily practice, awareness, suffering, transformation

Exercise: Stable Attention Joy

Sit and pay attention to just one breath. Follow the air from the very beginning of its entry into your nose until the moment it fully exits. Try to stay with one complete breath. After doing this, observe the state of your mind. Did a moment of ease arise from stable attention? This is the beginning germination of the seed of practice joy.

One who acted without attention
And now acts with awareness,
Illuminates this world
Like the moon without clouds

The Dhammapada

What brings us to mindfulness practice? While some people might come to practice out of curiosity to learn something new, I think most people come with some kind of hope. This could be hope for reducing physical or mental pain, finding tools to cope with loss or difficult times in life, or understanding existential questions. Some people, both in the West and East, come to practice hoping to ease others’ suffering. Therapists or educators, for instance, often come wanting to learn tools they can apply in their work with patients or children. Sometimes the motivation is, of course, “self-improvement” – a feeling inherent to our Western culture that we need to work on “the self-project.”

These motivations are just part of the range of practitioners’ hopes. However, it’s important to remember that at the root of Western mindfulness practice, which is a contemporary development, lies Buddhist practice, which is fundamentally based on the hope of reaching a state of “awake consciousness.”

This awake consciousness is an ideal state from the Buddhist perspective because it doesn’t build additional suffering on top of the unavoidable pain in our lives. It’s a consciousness free from delusion regarding the circumstances of our lives as humans in a constantly changing world, giving rise to deep wisdom about how to meet these life events in a flexible, free, and beneficial way. The central insight of awake consciousness in Buddhism is also a state where the narrow, fixed boundaries of the self expand to recognize the web of mutual interdependence of all phenomena in the world. Therefore, this consciousness is described as clear and compassionate, capable of holding the broader perspective and not just the system of interests surrounding our limited self.

Unlike this unusual description, Western mindfulness practice is a concept and technique that has entered psychological streams of short-term, research-based interventions. Given this, its goals are much more modest psychological goals: reducing symptoms of mental distress and fostering qualities related to resilience. While there are current research trends in the Western mindfulness world that address practice as having the potential to change our self-perception and the boundaries of our identification, most engagement with Western mindfulness is in the realm of reducing personal psychological distress.

In Buddhist thought, the idea is presented that humans can be liberated from suffering. This is a radical idea because it presents a challenging picture of human existence where we are subject to the unavoidable pain of birth, aging, illness, and death. Even separation from loved ones or proximity to unwanted people falls into this list of unavoidable pain. In other words, the Buddhist perspective is that the facts of existence in a human body include contact with inevitable change in our bodies, at every moment of our lives, and in the bodies of those close to us. Beyond this pain that is unavoidable in human life, Buddhism presents a picture of additional suffering that we repeatedly create without being aware of it.

This additional suffering is the product of how our consciousness encounters the unavoidable facts of life. So far, Buddhism might sound very pessimistic to us. But along with this difficult picture, an optimistic view is presented claiming that every person, regardless of their life circumstances, can find a way to free themselves from the suffering that consciousness creates. Liberation can come from awake consciousness. In this chapter, we seek to understand what such awake consciousness is. We’ll begin by describing what exists in our ordinary consciousness – painful and common mental states that each of us knows well – and then enter the uncharted territory of awake consciousness to understand what it contains, how it manifests, and how to cultivate it.

The common word in the West to describe awake consciousness is “enlightenment.” This may be related to English translations. But this word is also connected to the fact that the liberation described in Buddhist thought in the Buddha’s experience (the name Buddha means “one who has awakened”) is a powerful and transformative experience leading to a completely different view of reality. I remember the first time I heard the word “enlightenment” from Western Buddhist practitioners. It was a conversation that took place on a street in Neve Tzedek about twenty-five years ago, a few years after I had started studying Buddhist practice in monasteries in East Asia. I listened quietly to two friends talking about attaining enlightenment. I was amazed because they spoke about it so directly. Until then, I hadn’t thought that people who practice even think about this concept so concretely. I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t say anything but thought I would be content if my practice led to a little relief from the mental pain I was experiencing at that time.

I came to practice through a personal crisis and existential questions that arose due to my father’s sudden death, so reducing the pain I experienced was a satisfactory outcome even without fantasies about enlightenment. Over the years, as I deepened my study of Buddhism, I understood something else about the discomfort I felt during that conversation. It partly stemmed from the fact that “enlightenment” is not an accurate word for describing the peak of the practice process. The words awareness or awakening are much closer to the meaning of the words in the distant culture from which Buddhism came.

But this awareness is no less ambitious than achieving enlightenment through mystical states. It describes a state of clarity, clarity of consciousness, and even though its description varies in each Buddhist stream, the descriptions focus on a state where wisdom has been internalized and a skilled process of meeting the external and internal reality of our lives occurs. Therefore, describing awake consciousness will also include describing the painful and confused consciousness – these are two sides of the process described in Buddhism: on one hand, to look directly at pain and explore its sources, and on the other hand, to transform consciousness.

What Covers the Awake Consciousness Right Now?

When we sit quietly, with eyes closed, witnessing the body’s sensations, the breath, emotional tones, moods, and thoughts, we are often actually witnessing a variety of states of discomfort or pain. As mentioned, these states are often what led us to seek answers in the first place. In Buddhist thought, there is a detailed description of such states of discomfort. In Western Buddhism, these states are called “guests” because they are wave-like – they come and go like clouds across an open sky – although this is definitely not our experience at the beginning.

The “guests” are pain states that have such strong repetitiveness that they sometimes seem permanent to us. In early Buddhist thought, they received a harsh name: “defilers of consciousness” or even “tormentors of consciousness.” This is testimony to the real experience that when we identify with these states as “self” or “mine,” we are in an experience that can be simply called suffering or discomfort. But despite this being a difficult and unpleasant experience, the main question is how we learn to meet it in a beneficial way.

In our encounter with the pain of the “guests,” an important lesson about transformation is hidden. Because in practice, pushing away what is painful will not lead to a state of awareness, but rather the direct encounter with it, which deepens our ability to clearly understand our human experience and that of other people. After we understand deeply, there is grace hidden within and beyond the guests, as Stephen and Andrea Levine, teachers who have accompanied people who are dying, poetically expressed it: “Although we might imagine each of our missteps as ‘falling from grace,’ in truth it is falling through grace.” Or in the stronger words of a Tibetan Buddhist teacher:

You look like a practitioner
When your belly is full and the sun is shining.
And like a regular person
The moment things go wrong.

The encounter with what “goes wrong” in life or in practice is the material from which the alchemist creates gold; the gold of awake consciousness that doesn’t tremble or slip away from meeting with life.

The Five Guests That Torment Consciousness

Typically, the painful guests are categorized as five mental and emotional states (although there are additional details and varieties of them in later Buddhist texts, texts called Abhidhamma – a kind of detailed maps of mental states). Buddhism deals extensively with detailing and cataloging mental states because, according to its view, in order to develop the clarity of consciousness, we need to know exactly what the experience is right now and whether it leads to additional pain or to liberation. The guests are, as mentioned, painful mental states that the practitioner is invited to learn to identify.

Craving

The consciousness that is unsatisfied and constantly seeking the next sensory pleasure (in Buddhism, thought is also a sense, so there is a craving consciousness that may awaken even toward mental content such as fantasies, memories, and plans). According to Buddhism, the problem is not rooted in pleasure and enjoyment themselves, but in the craving consciousness that seeks to grasp and fixate on the “pleasant” so that it will be amplified, fixed, and remain in our possession forever. Such craving is itself an unpleasant experience, even though it is supposedly connected to pleasant experiences. It contains restlessness and a constant dissatisfaction. It is a powerful drive, but fortunately, it is not the only drive that can direct the river of our lives toward the great sea.

Aversion and Rejection

The consciousness experiencing aversion and rejection seeks to push away experiences categorized as unpleasant. Aversion and rejection include all shades of unpleasant emotions associated with them – anger, pushing away, anxiety, and even certain sadness where we don’t want to be in contact with what exists at the moment. This guest of aversion is familiar to all of us, and usually, we can also identify it as suffering. Unlike the guest of craving who sings us a much more complex song, and sometimes it’s hard for us to identify the suffering involved in our pursuit of pleasant experiences, it’s relatively easy for us to identify the feelings born from the movement of aversion.

Restlessness and Worry

This is a state of mind full of thoughts, planning, and even feelings of worry and anxiety. This guest too is relatively easy for us to identify, and this is even though, as human beings in Western culture, we place great trust in running from thought to thought and attempting to control reality. Our culture actually nurtures this quality of restlessness, to such an extent that sitting doing nothing is almost a subversive act. Most of us are no longer used to it, and any slowing down is experienced as a threat to a habit we identify with. For example, the collective slowdown and lockdown that we all experienced during the last Passover holiday due to the coronavirus pandemic exposed our habit of immersing ourselves in frantic activity even on the eve of a holiday; the effect was similar to that of intensive mindfulness practice on a busy mind. It is very unpleasant to see these painful mental states, these guests, but when we look courageously at the expression of each guest and don’t get caught in the enticing world of content they present to us, we can directly encounter the painful consciousness, the jumpy, restless consciousness that cannot focus on a single moment of ease without immediately moving toward the next object. This direct encounter is a necessary stage for the transformation of the guests, as we shall see later.

Dullness and Fogginess

Dullness and fogginess are also a very familiar guest. They may be an expression of physical experience but can also be a kind of mental fog without connection to physical fatigue. These are largely the product of our collective cultural conditioning. Human beings are animals that were meant to go to sleep with the sunset and wake up with sunrise. But our lifestyle often makes us foggy and tired on the physical level.

When we encounter physical fatigue, it is indeed good to rest. But when we are no longer physically tired and still encounter a foggy consciousness, sometimes what is actually hiding beneath it is the guest of aversion. There is a certain fogginess hiding sadness we haven’t met or a longing of the heart for more open spaces. When I teach long practice retreats, it’s not uncommon to see that in the first days, the guest of fogginess is a frequent visitor in the meditation hall, but as time passes, it appears less and less, and clarity takes its place.

Doubt

The guest of doubt embodies a movement of consciousness that pulls the ground from under our feet. In the context of practice, for example, suspicion arises that there is no substance in our practice, our learning, the guidance we received. This is not about questions that drive us to learn things deeply, but about a movement that doesn’t allow us to have enough trust to try to understand what is really happening. The guest of doubt is the quiet voice that often whispers in our ears advice of mistrust. Of course, we should be people who can doubt things, examine them, understand if something is right for us or not. But when we have chosen a certain path, it’s good to identify the voices trying to undermine our choice. This guest is the skepticism that holds us back and doesn’t allow for genuine and clear investigation.

How to Meet the Painful Guests

At the beginning of practice, the “unpleasant” may feel so dominant and the arrival of the guests so frequent that sometimes we might get the impression that they fill the entire consciousness. We sit and pay attention to the body’s sensations and the breath, and immediately a feeling of aversion to something arises: “Oh no, it’s so hot, I hate this weather.” And while this is speaking, the guest of craving is already waiting around the corner: “I wish it was winter already or maybe I’ll go to a mountain peak.” The guests of restlessness and thought abundance about the future to come are busy with plans and shopping lists, and the tired and foggy consciousness takes over the space. Finally, often the guest of doubt appears and sings us the familiar song in which we describe to ourselves all our failures and doubt the practice, the teacher, perhaps also this book, and our ability in general to do something about the existing situation.

When the guests take over the picture, not necessarily in the order described here, we find ourselves as in the traditional story about Milarepa, the legendary Buddhist practitioner who arrived at his cave one day and found a group of demons eating his food, sitting on his meditation cushion, and generally having a painful celebration throughout his consciousness.

It’s not pleasant, but this is exactly what practice is supposed to expose to us. Although it may be hard to believe, the guests are not a product of the practice and the quiet sitting. They live in our consciousness as mental habits that we repeat over and over. Practice is a rare opportunity to expose what drives our daily behavior often toward areas of difficulty and excessive suffering. We can learn, of course, to meet these states without adding oil to the fire of discomfort. A significant part of practice deals with this.

In the story about Milarepa in the cave, he tries different strategies of pushing away the demons – he stands over them and gives them wise speeches to no avail. Then he shouts and tries to drive them away. Finally, after these rejections only strengthen the demons, he sits down and meets them face to face and at eye level.

Paradoxically, the face-to-face meeting with the guests doesn’t weaken us, as we fear, but nurtures a stable presence. When we meet the guests in practice, we can think about this image of Milarepa in the cave, and examine what happens when I think about “meeting the guests at eye level,” meaning giving validity to the fact that this pain exists now. Paying attention to the actual sensations occurring in the body, paying attention to the breath, staying a few more minutes in presence with the guest, and examining what happens when we remain stable with it.

Of course, there are also stubborn demons. Milarepa saw that the only skilled movement left for him facing them was to let them swallow him. The intention here is not to be completely absorbed in the pain, but sometimes our rejection strategies are so sophisticated that there is no choice but to make the completely opposite movement and surrender. But usually, anything we meet at eye level and with stability becomes an experience that can be borne, an experience that doesn’t take over the entire picture.

Practice with the guests can be described as a process in which several stages/aspects occur:

• Identifying the guest and even a gentle mental labeling: “Here’s craving”, “Here’s resistance/anger/criticism.”
• Trying to feel how we experience the guest in the body: Is the experience pleasant? Unpleasant? Where is it in the body? What is the actual sensation at the moment?
• Accepting the fact that this is our experience at the moment. Giving trust in the ability of our awareness not to be frightened by the guest. The phrase “this is how it is now” is an excellent phrase for this acceptance.
• Alert and interested attention: What happens in the experience when we are attentive and interested? Does the guest’s experience (craving, aversion, restlessness, etc.) intensify? Weaken?

There is great importance to identifying the guests and developing our ability to feel them without trying to push them away immediately when we feel uncomfortable. This ability is an important skill that allows us a deep understanding of the reasons for the existence of the painful guests, the situations in which their presence intensifies, and in contrast, the ways to weaken their grip.

The dominance of these guests is so great that I remember when my friend Karen Arbel and I conducted a five-day practice retreat in the Arava, we asked ourselves if it would be alright to talk already on the first evening about the model of awake consciousness, or if the talk would only intensify the participants’ feeling that something is not right with their practice, since the encounter with the guests is more dominant than anything else. Eventually, we decided that we would indeed begin the retreat with a description of the components of awake consciousness that will be presented below, since it allows us access to the horizon of practice and identification of moments when the guests are not occupying the entire hotel, and sometimes aren’t present at all.

You are invited to listen to this description of awake consciousness as a deep echo of a sound in which you can identify a real potential, even if at the moment it is experienced only as small seeds or flashes of grace where the space begins to reveal itself to them, and we suddenly encounter a different landscape from that of the clouding states.

How are these guests we’ve described so far related to awake consciousness? As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, Buddhism describes to us a journey that begins with a consciousness trapped in building additional suffering that adds to the unavoidable pain in our lives. The guests we described are themselves in practice the suffering consciousness itself. When they are revealed to us in practice and we learn to identify them, we are already on the path leading from the painful mental state to awake consciousness. We learn to bear the direct encounter with the components of suffering, with the guests themselves. Therefore, the entire process of Buddhist awareness is a process of transformation – transformation of painful mental states. Like in the alchemist’s image who turns ordinary metal into gold, so does a skilled encounter with the guests transform them into awareness.

Organs of Awareness

Awake consciousness is described in different ways in the various traditions of Buddhist thought. Therefore, it wouldn’t be accurate to generalize in this matter. One of the ways in which awake consciousness is described is according to the categories of “seven factors of awake consciousness.” This is a central model in Buddhism and appears already in early Buddhism and later in texts called Abhidhamma – a kind of detailed maps of mental states. These qualities, according to Buddhism, are opposite qualities to the painful guests we described earlier.

It’s possible that they exist in consciousness as small seeds, but practice nurtures and strengthens them from small flashes that might be familiar to us to a stable space.

Before moving to the description of the components of awake consciousness, it’s worth asking why the word “organs” (or alternatively, factors or qualities) is used to describe awake consciousness. Beyond the fact that this is the literal translation of the word in Pali, the language of the discourses, Buddhist discourses liken these components to roof tiles connected to form a slope climbing toward the highest point on the roof. Just as the tiles connect to the highest point on the roof, so do these awakening organs connect in the practitioner’s consciousness who trains in cultivating them and incline consciousness toward liberation.

The Seven Factors of Awake Consciousness

In the model of the seven awakening factors, mindfulness is the first! This should please us, readers of this book, since the meaning of including mindfulness as an awakening factor is that the attentiveness we cultivate in practice is a kind of “spice” of attention that is gathered over time into a momentum that can lead us very far. Indeed, one moment of alert attention to a body sensation seems very far from the description of awake consciousness, but in practice, in the moment we pay attention, a momentum of beneficial quality has been created and a flash of awareness. One full step on the ground with attention is also a moment of awareness. The next factor described in the model is investigation of phenomena – the ability to understand what we’re paying attention to and approach it. Following it comes vitality – energy, the opposite of dullness and lethargy, which counteracts the familiar foggy states. In the list of awakening factors appears the joy of practice describing a consciousness that has satisfaction just from our presence with things, and following it a quality of tranquility that is a remedy for consciousness filled with restlessness. Then deep concentration, and finally – a quality of mental stability – an awakening factor describing the balanced consciousness that doesn’t crash into the changes of life. In the next part of the chapter, I will describe each of the awakening factors in detail, incorporating practices that will help us taste and cultivate these qualities also in everyday life.

The First Factor of Awake Consciousness – Mindfulness

When our attentiveness is established as a factor of awakening, we can assume that it is no longer just a momentary flash of attention, but an ongoing and stable attention. The establishment of mindfulness is not a goal in itself in Buddhism. It is a quality that allows us to discern what is and isn’t present in consciousness, and thereby to choose which quality is worth cultivating at a given moment and in what way. In practice, as mentioned, it begins to drive a chain of beneficial and liberating qualities. Mindfulness is considered a balancing factor. It is a kind of anchor of the entire practice process, and therefore is considered beneficial in any state. I tend to say that if we added the “spice” of mindfulness, alert and balanced attention, to the “soup” of consciousness at the moment, regardless of what soup we’re talking about, the dish will begin to change.

Investigation of Phenomena

The second factor of awake consciousness to which we’ll refer is “investigation of phenomena.” The word investigation in Hebrew evokes perhaps a negative connotation of police investigation, or in the better case of intellectual analytical investigation. However, in the Buddhist practice context, this quality called “investigation of phenomena” is the ability to observe directly the experience in the present moment and to investigate the moment during practice. That is, the goal is not just intellectual understanding, but a deep encounter with the nature of the present experience. Even if the investigation requires thinking ability, this is a type of intellect that examines experiences and lives them at the same time.

Investigation means a curious and interested look at what is present in the experience. This look becomes possible when we approach what is present with interest and ask some wise questions about the nature of the experience or phenomenon we are examining (bodily sensation, emotion, thought, sound, etc.). As our mindfulness becomes established, we have a real possibility to approach phenomena in a way that can see their nature clearly. Attention learns to stay anchored and not move in all directions. And so – when a wave of emotion or a mental event arrives – we can actually meet it more deeply and investigate it.

Awake consciousness is described as consciousness with analytical ability, but not one that poses confusing philosophical questions, and not even questions about the content revealed to us. The investigation conducted by awake consciousness is a deepening into the intimacy of the encounter with the phenomenon; to feel from within and understand from the direct encounter.

Thus, investigation can be directed toward moments of discomfort and even moments of ease: What exactly is happening now? What leads to what? What supports freedom and what continues to dig a hole of pain? Investigation of phenomena leads us to an understanding of the conditions and circumstances at the base of what exists at the moment. We begin to see the world as an emerging network of conditions creating the present moment more than as a fixed and dense individual experience. This vision changes our relationship to ourselves and others and allows us to distinguish wisely between what currently produces discomfort and suffering and what allows for ease.

Investigation of phenomena is an awakening quality. I think of investigation of phenomena as a movement of love. What is more loving than interest in our body sensations? In the emotional tone? In the quality and possibilities of human consciousness?

In everyday life, we can support such a quality by remembering the possibility of investigating three central principles: the impermanent nature of phenomena, the nature of our dissatisfaction and pain, and the nature of the self-experience as emerging from moment to moment. These are not simple subjects, but the investigation itself is simple. How to investigate this? We want to observe what arises and ask – is this experience permanent? Is it “me” in the sense of a fixed and always-present me? Is there discomfort in it? How is this emotion experienced in the body? What feeds it? What reduces its intensity?

This is not an investigation that should occur only with closed eyes during formal practice and can be performed at any given moment during the day. We can observe the light surrounding us at the moment and notice its change with the movement of the tree leaves: to let the movement of the world surround us and pay attention to it, or find the breath right now and see that it is constantly moving. To notice how our thoughts appear and dissipate. This is a direct investigation of the impermanent nature of all phenomena.

Vitality/Effort

Vitality, the third awakening factor in our count here, is a mental variable in Buddhism. It is a quality of energy opposite to fogginess and decline. The meaning of the word is also effort. We will understand the connection between these two meanings later.

Think about a moment when you saw a work of art that touched you – and suddenly the colors, smells, and thoughts would be clearer and more alive. The Buddhist horizon presents us with the possibility of encountering the occurring right now, in this vitality.

Vitality is deeply supported precisely by facts we tend to perceive as frightening or depressing – the recognition of our finitude and the impermanent nature of existence. In practice, the recognition of finitude can allow us to feel gratitude for the very presence of beloved people in our lives and for simple everyday moments.

Mindfulness is an awakening factor supporting vitality, because when I direct attention to physical sensations, emotional tone, and moods in an open way – I will discover contact with a pulsating field of life where the quality of vitality is very available. It’s impossible to fall asleep into life when we are really paying attention to this moment. At the same time, as vitality is more present, mindfulness intensifies.

Additionally, if we want to cultivate vitality in everyday life, nothing supports vitality more than remembrance of death. Suddenly the coffee we are drinking now is not just “another coffee.” It is THE coffee, THE conversation, THE hug. Spiritual urgency is a close cousin of vitality: it reminds us that the moment to incline consciousness toward what benefits it is only now. Like the well-known saying of the Dalai Lama about the fact that there are two days on which we cannot do anything – yesterday and tomorrow. When we find ourselves foggy, lacking energy, forgetting the love that once nourished our close relationships – this is a perfect moment to practice vitality.

Joy

The component or fourth factor of awake consciousness described here – joy – is perhaps somewhat surprising, since Buddhism is known to focus on investigating suffering. As we saw at the beginning of the chapter, Buddhism directs us to observe this complex phenomenon we call discomfort, lack of satisfaction, and suffering – “dukkha” in Pali. We observe our points of pain to understand several things: What is happening now? Is this unavoidable pain? Am I adding “arrows” of additional mental suffering to it? In what way does the suffering evolve?

But investigating suffering is not the whole story. There are many descriptions of joy in Buddhist thought. There is, of course, joy that we are familiar with arising from sensory pleasures. But what is joy as a quality of awake consciousness? It is not the circumstantial and fragile joy that comes from success or pleasure.

Let’s imagine something good happening in our lives. Perhaps we received a joyful message about a professional achievement or woke up to our favorite weather. In response to these events, joy might arise. We all know it and love it. There’s nothing wrong with it, until there is… Suddenly the achievement turns into failure or disappointment, and clouds cover our perfect day. What happens to joy then? It depends on conditions and circumstances that are so fragile. I like to call this state the “internal amusement park.”

We attach our joy to a constantly changing world, and like on a roller coaster – when things align exactly according to our desires, we are happy, and then a moment later, when the world does what it does – changes! – we lose our joy. This is a problematic state from the perspective of practice. And that’s not just because of its fragility but also because it creates in us a constant chase after the “perfect conditions” that we think will lead to joy. For example, I’m writing this chapter in a wonderful Tel Aviv café where I’ve been told that the owners roast the coffee themselves. I received a full explanation about the different types of coffee and about all the types of alternative milk currently available. Moreover, it turns out that between the types of coffee and the types of milk there is an interaction; the journey toward the perfect coffee becomes increasingly complicated. And then a sour coffee arrives at the table. What a crisis! We tried so hard to reach the perfect conditions of comfort, that the discomfort threatening to break through constantly turns life into tense and difficult.

This kind of joy, dependent on external conditions and the senses, is described in Buddhism as a stone thrown into a lake. The external event or the meeting of the senses with something pleasant is not the problem; it is a stone thrown into consciousness and then waves of joy arise. The question is whether this is the only joy that exists, whether its fragility is a price worth paying for a few moments of sensory joy.

There is no doubt that we have basic needs without which it would be complex to experience joy. There’s nothing wrong with having a good place to live and a roof over our heads, a basic sense of security in nutrition and our physical needs, and some good friends. But if we take a moment to look at our lives clearly, we can notice that even though there’s a chance that these basic needs are relatively met for most of us (at least in the West, where mindfulness is flourishing), nevertheless, many times we wake up in the morning “empty and afraid,” as Rumi calls it in one of his poems. If our joy was really dependent only on fulfilling these basic needs, we should be waking up in a high mood every day. But our joy is tightly dependent on our consciousness, not just on the fulfillment of these needs.

In the Buddhist discourse called Anana Sutta – the discourse on being without debts – there is a wonderful description of additional types of joy, related to ethical action. This is already a joy of the “householder,” and it is no longer dependent only on the chase after the “pleasant,” even though it is still a very earthly joy. This is, for example, the joy from the fact that we earn our living in a way that doesn’t involve harm, the joy of material or therapeutic giving to others, the joy of freedom from debts, the joy of a life without guilt, ethical life of giving.

The Exercise of Joy of Giving

Choose a day when you felt a bit less good. Perhaps you woke up a bit depressed, or maybe you’re tired. During the day, maintain attention and look for one small opportunity to practice caring giving to someone. Pay attention to the mood of the practice – giving is free, it is an experiment. When you have chosen to practice giving, notice a moment after to the feeling. Did a moment of joy arise? If so, note it to yourself. If not, that’s fine, take a few deep breaths and note the mood you encountered.

Joy as an Internal Spring – The Joy of Practice

Consciousness precedes all phenomena,
Consciousness is their head, all are made by consciousness,
If a person speaks or acts
With pure consciousness,
Happiness [joy, M.L.] follows
Like a shadow following him.

The Dhammapada

Before we continue to the next factors of awake consciousness, let’s stay another moment with the fourth component of joy. Unlike the image of the stone thrown into the lake, describing joy coming from external events or a pleasant experience of the senses, there is a type of joy described as an internal spring – joy as a quality of awake consciousness. This is a deep joy of being that is not dependent on conditions, the joy of practice.

When consciousness stabilizes through deeper mindfulness, vitality arises and we can investigate things more directly. And then it is revealed that a direct result of the stability of attention is the awakening of joy that is not dependent on the external world. Sometimes it can be a flash of ease a moment after we let go of a certain wave of thought or emotion, and it can even be a stronger feeling of joy, which becomes more available even when our life conditions are far from fulfilling the recipe for “perfect coffee.”

Cultivating such joy is important not just because it is pleasant; according to Buddhist thought, the joy of practice becomes over time “equipment of consciousness” that can be used when painful states arise in us. The ability to gladden the consciousness is one of the stages of traditional mindfulness practice, appearing in the discourse on cultivating mindfulness with the in and out breathing.

How to Cultivate the Joy of Practice?

The joy of practice is learning. The Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, wrote an entire book called “The Art of Happiness.” Perhaps we should note that there is a certain type of ease that arises when we learn things related to practice. As a guide, I recognize the experience also through the participants in courses sharing with me that the learning itself, beyond the practice, becomes a kind of anchor that has feelings of goodness. It’s easy to understand this feeling, contact with content that benefits us when we think about its opposite.

Think about a day or two that we spent in the company of a violent or painful series on Netflix. The feeling of contact with content in this way is often associated with depression. It’s not always clear what preceded what – the depression to watching or watching to depression. But in any case, we get up from such days with a feeling that can be defined as the opposite of the joy of practice, which is characterized by a quality of clarity and vitality.

Additionally, if we want to cultivate joy in everyday life, there is nothing more supportive of joy than the remembrance of death. Suddenly the coffee we’re drinking now is not just “another coffee.” It is THE coffee. It is THE conversation, THE hug. Spiritual urgency is a close relative of joy: it reminds us that the moment to incline consciousness toward what benefits it is only now. Like the well-known saying of the Dalai Lama that there are two days on which nothing can be done – yesterday and tomorrow. When we find ourselves foggy, lacking energy, forgetting the love that once nourished our close relationships – this is a perfect moment to practice in it joy.

Exercise of Stable Attention Joy

Sit and pay attention to just one breath. Follow the air from the very beginning of its entry into your nose until the moment it fully exits. Try to stay with one complete breath. After doing this, observe the state of your mind. Did a moment of ease arise from stable attention? This is the beginning germination of the seed of practice joy.

An additional interesting expression for the rising of practice joy is relaxing into something, the action of letting some content move on or some emotion simply be. In Buddhist thought, beneficial mental states that arise from the skill of letting go, relaxing, releasing from the chase are described.

Tranquility

A day of quiet
Can be a pilgrimage in itself

Hafiz

Tranquility is the fifth quality or the fifth factor of awake consciousness in the count of awakening factors brought here. The effect of tranquility is one of the qualities we in the West associate with practice very frequently. It is so attached to our image of practice until it becomes a problem. While there is no doubt that tranquility is a very important quality, when it is unbalanced, it can lead to passivity and falling asleep into life, qualities that practice is not interested in nurturing.

I remember how thirty years ago, every day at four in the morning in a monastery in Thailand where I studied, there was a conversation with Ajahn Buddhadasa Bhikku, a well-known Thai Buddhist teacher who was already very old at that time. One day he told us the following phrase: “Anyone can sit, even a dog sits all day!” It’s impossible to suspect that I don’t love dogs, but the meaning of his statement was clear; the teacher asked: What are you actually doing there when you sit with closed eyes? It’s worth thinking from time to time if our perception of practice is only as cultivating tranquility.

I recall a retreat I taught after breaking both my elbows in a home accident. Something happened automatically in my consciousness during this period, apparently in response to the pain, and I found myself in a very deep calm. The calmness was too deep, on the verge of dullness. This is an experience that doesn’t characterize my life usually, and I noticed that it was becoming almost disturbing. I learned from my own flesh how much calmness, perceived as a very beneficial quality, can become an unbalanced quality.

At that moment, I felt gratitude for the fact that when there is no intense pain, my consciousness doesn’t tend toward this too-calm state. So tranquility is definitely one of the factors of awake consciousness, but let’s not mistakenly think it’s the only one.

And despite the danger of passivity, modern life is so loaded with tension, that even a light touch with the quality of tranquility immediately allows ease. When the body is more relaxed, and the consciousness calms, chains of beneficial states begin, for example, the ability to investigate, observe, be vital, and motivated.

Tranquility Exercise

Lie on your back and direct attention along the body resting on the ground. Notice the points of contact with the support of the earth. Slowly pass attention from the top of the head down and imagine how each part of the body becomes heavier, more relaxed, more fully resting on the supporting ground. Take deep and full breaths. If you noticed a muscle holding tension in the face area – the forehead, the eyes, the lips, the chin – you can inhale air and imagine that with the exhalation the tension in that area relaxes.

Tranquility Exercise in Everyday Life

Several times a day, during daily activities, pay attention to the shoulder area and relax the grip. Find one tense muscle in the face and relax it. Imagine that you are relaxing the grip on thoughts and consciousness at that moment. This is a version I really like, where we can practice tranquility and relaxation not just with closed eyes but right in the midst of everyday life, both at home when family members are present and at work.

Unification and Concentration

The sixth factor of awakening consciousness is called samadhi in Pali. This is a word that is difficult to translate precisely, and it is usually translated as “concentration” or “absorption.” Since the topic of the chapter is awake consciousness in everyday life and not in deep meditative states, I won’t expand much on this topic. It’s good to know that in Buddhist teaching, there are descriptions regarding awake consciousness of gradations of states of concentration and unification that deepen and allow transformation and deep work with the various guests.

These states of concentration embody a gradation of different mental states than usual. In the Buddhist tradition, they are sometimes presented as not necessary for the process of liberation and building deep wisdom, but there is a growing stream of Buddhism scholars who see the deep concentration states as an inseparable part of the practice process. Within these concentration states are described several types of joy, change in relation to thoughts and their rhythm, and increasing clarity. Can we practice these states in everyday life? Opinions on this matter are divided.

Mental Stability

Not to be disturbed by the order of things or
By the collapse of things

Israel Eliraz

The last factor in the count of factors of awake consciousness constitutes one of the most important qualities in Buddhism. Mental stability, “upekkha” in Pali, is so central that sometimes it is a synonymous name for awareness itself.

What is mental stability? It is a quality of observing things as they arise, without omitting and storming in the face of the waves of life. A close description to this quality is found in the Pali word Tatramajjhattata, which means “to stand in the middle of all this.” This is similar to a person walking in the city square or in the market (in our case perhaps in a mall) who can stay in contact with the ground (or with the floor), with the breath, with life without being swept toward the pleasant or automatic rejection of the unpleasant.

Mental stability, traditionally, is a quality that supports the possibility of meeting the fact that life is wave-like, and it’s always possible that we will experience how success turns to failure, praise and honor to blame and shame. We have no control over the way people talk about us, and we also have no control over circumstances that can change and bring with them a change in our social status. All of these are situations that require mental stability in ordinary life.

But mental stability as a factor of consciousness is not just stability in the face of these changes, but also in the face of the movement of our internal lives and in the face of finitude and transience. When this quality enters a space of relationship between people, it is considered a quality that enables relationships to be “boundless,” “apamana” in Pali, a word describing a series of stable and broad qualities of relationship. That is, mental stability will allow our friendship not to be dependent on conditions and on the other fulfilling the entire range of our expectations.

Mental stability will allow us to direct our compassion beyond our close circle – meaning not to be limited only to those dear to us. It will allow our joy in the joy of others to be accessible without the constant comparison of the economy of love that we manage with the world, according to which the resources of joy are limited, and when someone experiences it, something is taken from us. Mental stability in its depth is a quality of expansion of the narrow and painful self concerned only with its own needs. It allows us to see in a broad perspective both ourselves and the other as emerging within a network of dynamic conditions and circumstances. For as Aldous Huxley said, “There is no social stability without personal stability.”

The practice of mental stability is deeply embedded within all the familiar instructions of mindfulness. When we decide to sit for twenty minutes and not get up – this is a practice of mental stability. When we follow a breath and return ourselves to this anchor every time attention wanders off to thoughts and stories – this is a practice of mental stability. When we delayed our conditioned reactivity to certain sounds, to an itch, to an uncomfortable temperature – this is a practice of mental stability. This practice will begin to be a tremendous resource in everyday life when we notice, for example, that a pattern of anger is arising towards our child and we can bring ourselves back to the ground, breathe a few breaths, and not react in our habitual way. It can be trained in a directed way through exercises of delaying reactivity.

One of the patterns that allowed me to practice many times the subject of mental stability in everyday life was the call “Mom, I’m hungry!” that would greet me for years from my beloved son when I would return home from guiding a weekend of practice or long workshops. It started with the thin voice of a sweet toddler and continued to develop into the deep voice of a teenager. The call would reach my ears the second I opened the door, as I was returning tired but full of inspiration after holding processes of many people and work that begins in the early morning hours and ends late at night. I would experience myself literally crashing into this call. Painful mental patterns would change at a dizzying pace. All the quiet and stability I felt in the guidance would change in an instant into an emotional flood. It was clear to me that I was experiencing contact with a repetitive emotional pattern that I carry with me as a reenactment of early experiences, experiences not at all related to my son and my love for him and my joy in returning home to him, but as a world imprisoning me in sub-threshold sensations that often have no clear name.

This pattern drew my attention. I had no choice, because even though I knew what was going to happen in the experience each time, I would still enter the same whirlpool over and over. Over the years, I developed the practice of “the key approaching the door.” I began to direct curious attention to my walk in the stairwell corridor when I return home from guiding long workshops and to slow it down. I paid attention to the feeling of taking out the key from the bag, of its approach to the lock, of its insertion into the door, of pressing on the handle. I paid attention to the feeling of longing for the household members along with the tension that rises, painful emotions, guilt over leaving, fear that they will want something from me right now when I am exhausted. It was a holding onto the quiet of practice and the depth processes that are home to me, versus what was perceived at that moment as “trivial matters” like food preparation and daily life maintenance. And any holding of ours, even if in things that seem deep and good to us, leads straight to suffering.

So, year after year, I practiced a mindful entry into the heart of the whirlpool. Nothing improved, but there was awareness accompanying the process. And then, one evening about a year ago, when I brought the key to the door, suddenly joy arose – joy about the fact that I am about to meet the painful mental pattern, this time like meeting an old friend. This joy made me laugh. I entered the house and heard the call “Mom, I’m hungry!” attached to the sound of the house door opening, and then, in amazing synchronicity, my son started laughing. Me too. The pattern no longer imprisoned us. It can return, but it doesn’t have the same power since stability was born facing it.

Exercise of Delaying Reactivity

Take a paper and write down a few familiar triggers that set you off. Maybe it’s the moment you come home from work and discover a pile of dishes in the sink. Maybe a certain sentence that when a colleague says it in your presence something in you begins to lose balance. Try to write five or six such things. Don’t worry, the moment we begin to identify them, it’s hard to stop…

Now rank the list from the heaviest to the lightest. From the thing that really takes you out of balance to things that just slightly disturb you. Choose the lightest item on the list and follow it for a few days. Every time the trigger occurs, try to remind yourself that this is an excellent opportunity to practice mental balance. Try to delay reactivity by just a few seconds. Do this through monitoring a few deep breaths.

In this chapter, we have encountered the horizon of the seven qualities of awake consciousness. This is a broad and open horizon leading us from the narrow feeling that we are a small boat tossed on the great waves of life, to an experience where consciousness becomes something in which we can place trust. Every moment of cultivation is a moment that strengthens what is beneficial. In a world where everything changes and passes, cultivating consciousness is a gift that “keeps on giving” – it can accompany us in our lives through all the situations we will encounter. This is what Buddhism calls a “refuge” that is safe and real.

This is informational, not medical advice.

Sources

Sources

1. Thanks to Dr. Karen Arbel for reading and comments on this chapter.

2. Dhammapada, Pieces of Truth (2008), Translation: Shai Schwartz, Dhammadana Publishing, p. 133.

3. See chapter discussing the boundaries of self in Western mindfulness in Lieblich, Mindfulness – Being Here and Now.

4. See this description in "Discourse on the Immediate Condition" in Arbel, Words of the Buddha, p. 148.

5. Levine, S. & Levine, O. (1995), Embracing the Beloved. Relationship as a path of awakening, Anchor Books.

6. Rinpoche, P. (1991), Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, Wisdom Publications.

7. Bodhi, B. (Ed.) (2003), A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma, Pariyatti Publishing.