Right mindfulness means to divide--to focus upon the body, or feelings, or mind, etc., in and of themselves.
I have tried to bring you out of the idea of mindfulness.
To cause you to look at who is mindful.
Mindfulness is a good practice, for without judging the appearances and not becoming involved in them, we can easily see the space and know we are not what appears.
With this, mindfulness is dropped, the other shore is reached.
There is no atman in and of itself to be found--
Nothing at all exists without something to confirm it.
What confirms the atman? What confirms perception?
See that it is only another perception.
Actually, I'm careful about misrepresentations, so I do use a lot of source texts. Your assertion that it is anything else is your own imagining and projection.
I am not concerned with representing anything, I am no more entangled in belief systems or any other form of delusion. You try to limit my words, define them within a larger system.
The problem is that it is mind which decides what is right and wrong, you devour information and gradually it shapes your reality. I only wish to bring you out of this, your definitions make it impossible to reach truth - you already have the answers, so the questions bounce off you.
I imagine and project nothing, I only want to point out these things are not original, it is all just more accumulation. Shake off the dust and find out what is original, "what is your face before your mother was born?"
Circular reasoning. Your premise regarding anatta seems to be faulty.
The self is a pattern of thoughts which give you solidity, that define you.
Anatta points at the delusion in this.
Look at the three marks of existence. Anatta, impermanence, and dukkha are how we identify something as existing--that it is not just all a product of our mind--reality is stranger than we can imagine--assurance against solipsism.
I would go even further than solipsism, for even the self depends something to confirm it. The very assumption that because these things appear to be happening, we must be, it is simply flawed. We seem to look at everything except this self when we apply impermanence, we do not understand that anatta is exactly impermanence applied to the self. In belief that the self is real lies all dukkha, it is not true and we notice its changeability, we want to think we are real though, we don't want to see that what we believe ourselves to be is just another arising in consciousness.
In truth, we are not even the awareness which sees all in consciousness. Many fall into the trap of clinging to this because they want to insist they are SOMETHING. This very idea of being something is the problem though, liberation is when this is overcome.
To this statement, my Sen-sei might twist your ear and ask you, "Is this real?"
It is a temporary appearance, since it is impermanent it cannot be called real.
The pain seems intimate, but it is because we wrongly position ourselves, we say "I am in pain" because we place ourselves in the body. We label this sensation pain and so we suffer trying to move past it.
Howsoever the body responds to this action of the sen-sei, to become attached to the sensation will ensure we can no longer respond to his next action.
That would be making the error of going towards nihilism.
To the simple mind, it seems this way.
Nihilism first necessitates defining something as meaningful though. It is more a reaction to eternalism, but both are false. In reality there is nothing to subtract, there is nothing to add - it is all just the play of the mind.
Nibbana is beyond concepts--untraceable. It's not all about bliss.
This is what I am constantly trying to show.
You have many concepts, you want something which is traceable as "me".
Of course, bliss is a effect in the mind, it is a still mind but still an appearance, for whom is the bliss? Yet what else to call this? It is simply utter and complete no-thing-ness, before things to drop, before anyone to drop them.
The problem is we fall into the trap of doing, we want to think our actions are getting somewhere, but this is all happening in the illusion.
This is a long drawn out version of the koan "before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water".
Yet, please understand the fallacy of language here, we have decided a sequence of letters or a particular sound IS the thing we reference. We will tell ourselves a story, or recollect some past encounters with mountains, maybe we hiked with our family on one and begin to think of the fire that we told stories around. We are no longer seeing the mountain, we are now lost in thought.
The beauty of Zen is that now only the mountain is there, and it can be appreciated anew. We no more project something, we no longer look at some bunch of flowers or a tree that might be there, things we prefer to see. We finally simply see what is there.
Yet we are not the seer.
